I am sure that many have numerous accounts due to sign up bonuses, but I also have numerous retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, etc, for some reasons and I would like to consolidate my view. Is there any trustworthy place to consolidate reviewing/reporting of these? Are you using things like Mint? Do you feel comfortable with them or whoever else you use?
Suggestions so far:
- Spreadsheets
- Mint
- Personal Capital
- Quicken
- Spreadsheets
- Mint
- Personal Capital
- Quicken
0 voters
I do have most of my accounts in Mint, but I hardly login anymore. It’s just too much of a pain to manage, let alone utilize the interface. I get it–they tried to make it slick. However, the amount of clicks and refreshes it takes to manage the 100+ accounts I have in it, just demonstrates its inability to scale. Mint is for folks with 10-20 accounts at best.
Not to mention after all these years, Mint still can’t connect reliably with some FIs.
For credit cards, I use a spreadsheet that I update once per month (opens/closes/BT balances/etc) which I input the credit limit, the amount used, the date opened, etc. This then automatically calculates the age of the account, the percent of the CL used, and the like.
I only have one mortgage so that’s not a huge deal to track. I have one auto account, so I don’t track it either. Most of my stuff is on auto pay for the statement balance or minimum payment for BT balances. I have found in recent months that tracking financial accounts like I used to (daily or even multiple times per day) was just a waste of time.
Setup appropriate alerts on accounts you don’t use often, setup auto pay for at least the minimum due to avoid late/missed payments, and let it ride. That’s my new tactic.
Edit: I have a separate workbook to track signup bonuses (one sheet per card), and another to track my reward balances.
4 Likes
Yeah, I am definitely not in that camp. I have two mortgages (for two different properties) and one auto account. Outside of that, I have numerous in the other categories. My big gripe is brokerage/retirement accounts. Some of the brokerage accounts I have already are bad at tracking things themselves, so that is part of the problem (like determining the number of shares for a particular holding). Also, I can’t consolidate many of the accounts, at this point, which would be ideal.
Personal Capital. You get calls every so often from them trying to sell you their managed service, but I politely decline. I manage based off of net worth and I wouldn’t say it’s a budgeting tool. But gives you a macro view of what’s going on.
I’m like jaytrader. Too many accounts to use Mint as a one stop shop. All I have in mint are my 3 most used credit card banks: Chase, Citi, and Discover. I periodically go in and pull all of the transactions from all my credit cards with those banks and look at what we’ve spent in each category to see if there are any trends I need to keep an eye on for budgeting purposes. Every few months, I manually log in to all my bank accounts that have balances and put everything in to a spreadsheet to see what I have liquid. All of our bills are on auto-pay except for local water/sewer (they take credit cards for single payments with no fee but only ACH for auto-pay).
[quote=“Danman, post:5, topic:2482, full:true”]
Personal Capital. You get calls every so often from them trying to sell you their managed service, but I politely decline. I manage based off of net worth and I wouldn’t say it’s a budgeting tool. But gives you a macro view of what’s going on.
[/quote]I just don’t pick up their calls. Personal Capital is the best alternative I’ve found for the old Yodlee.
Second the vote for PC.
I just log into each account that I use once every few weeks. While I have many accounts, I only actually use around 5 on a regular basis.
With a password manager app, it’s super easy to log in and fill in credentials automatically.
I don’t feel the need to log into an account that’s an old shelved credit union (CU) share account with $5 in it on any regular basis. If I log in every month or two, or 6, that seems fine. I assume they’ll send me snail mail if there’s some kind of theft attempt, overdraft, or whatever.
Then I set up an every 6-months auto transfer of a few cents from one of my main accounts into each of my shelved old CU accounts. To avoid in activity.
1 Like
Spreadsheets (LibreOffice). I use them to keep track of all income (including pay stubs), spending (including monthly budget with a pie chart! 
), current balances (including statement dates, due dates, any amounts due, pending rewards, etc), signup bonuses (including redeemed offers, current offers, and dates (opening, closing, and next bonus eligibility)), net worth, income taxes, etc.
Some accounts (like brokerage and retirement) have their own sheets, with transactions listed and balances (and annual gains/losses for non-retirement accounts) added up at the bottom. I know what my 1099’s (and W-2’s) will look like before I get them. The balances appear in the summary sheet, so it’s not a mess.
1 Like
I have been using Quicken since 1999. I buy the Premier version once every 3 years when they sunset the connectivity to my bank accounts. It links to just about every bank and brokerage I’ve used.
The automatic download and categorization features make it well worth the $50 or so I have to spend each time I have to upgrade.
That being said, in 2018 they are switching to a subscription-based model. I will probably buy 2017 for $35 to get me through 2020 since it appears the subscription will cost around $60 per year.
1 Like
Uhm… I tried to turn suggestions into a poll (in the wiki), hoping that other options may be added after the poll was created. Now I can’t remove it 
.
Other options still be added to the wiki as bullets…
1 Like
If you have an account at USAA, its web account management screen allows you to link external accounts to your USAA landing page. I find it helpful, but I suppose there’s a risk that if USAA gets hacked, there is a risk that log-on credentials to the external accounts could be compromised.
I use a spreadsheet.
I recently set this up to pay the minimum payment on all my cards. I was holding out because I was worried there’d be fraudulent transactions on cards I don’t use or that the autopay would result in overpaying, but missing payments ended up costing me a lot more than dealing with those two potential issues. I’d say not setting up auto-pay sooner has been one of my worst personal financial decisions (which in the grand scheme isn’t that bad, but I’m still young).
Thoughts on why PC over Mint? I just want a good aggregator, so I don’t care about the investment interface/offerings (PC) or budgeting tools (Mint). I’ve tried many tools and it seems that after a couple months they just lose access to my accounts and I have to re-login or re-set them up which means I stop using the service. Has this improved over the last couple years?
I use a spreadsheet. Update once every week, helps me track expenses and with budgeting too. Each card get it’s own sheet.
I use PC. But I don’t really care about tracking monthly budget/spending etc…They have some ability to do that…but I have never messed with it.
I do my saving/investing off the top…then don’t worry if I spend whatever else.
I just like tracking net worth month to month.
I track net worth and investment income per account on a spreadsheet.
I also use a spreadsheet as my primary tool. I have PC and mint but as others have mentioned it has some limitations.
Has anyone found a bank that auto pays the minimum or full amount due balance on credit cards vs the credit cards pulling the minimum? I’d rather manage it at a consolidated bank view than having to setup checking account information for each new credit card.
My computer came with Microsoft Excel and I have the data of all 20 some accounts inputted on one page. Account number, routing number, interest rate, phone number, username, password, and current balance. I update it usually at the beginning of the month after interest has been credited. You can set up a column of data to keep a running total so you can see how much money you have at a glance.