How Do You Manage Your Accounts?

It’s a terrible idea to keep the account balance, number, username and password all in the same excel file. It’s a single point of failure. I’m pretty sure the password on “password-protected” excel files can be trivially brute-forced. You should store the more valuable information (username and password) properly, like using Password Safe or its derivatives.

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I have the username and passwords abbreviated so only I know what they actually mean. Besides, I’m the only one using the computer, so unless someone broke into the house and started to search my computer, there isn’t much risk.

That might work.

Is your computer connected to the internets?

If it’s plugged in to the power supply, it can be hacked (sometimes remotely) :slight_smile:

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Sure it’s connected. Guess anything can be hacked, but nothing particularly interesting here.

Was mint, just switched to Personal Capitol, everything about it seems better so far.

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I agree with this mindset. Would it be a huge headache if my entire identity and financial accounts got hacked? Of course it would. But people need to realize that people don’t care about them as much as they think. Meaning: you aren’t as big of a target as some would lead you to believe. Anything’s possible, of course, but the likelihood of being completely compromised is just so low.

On the flip side, I do take care to ensure I have 2FA setup on my important accounts, and spreadsheets have passwords, etc.

Or just store and manage those files on a spare laptop not connected to the internet?

I also use spreadsheets. I have one worksheet that I update monthly balances on all of my checking/savings/retirement accounts then use another worksheet to track monthly changes in income/expenses and net worth. Been doing it this way for many years and works great for me. Only takes a few minutes to update once a month but I often review it weekly.

I also have a portfolio spreadsheet that I use for target allocation and rebalancing.

Other spreadsheets/worksheets track other items more specifically, such as credit card open/close/min spend requirements/cancelation deadlines, income/savings from cashback and travel redemptions, churn fees, etc.

I used Yodlee for years until they made the site virtually unusable. I recently started using Fidelity Full View since I already had multiple Fidelity accounts. It’s somewhat similar to the old Yodlee. It’s not great, but good enough for now.

I may give Personal Capital a shot some day. I don’t like that they try to call you, but I can always ignore them.

Quicken since 1992. PC is nice but does not allow for your own entry and reconciliation of daily activities.

There was a FWF thread years ago where folks listed their own special sauce on how to record their login IDs, PWs, etc in code. There were tens of codes listed… using binary, octal, hexadecimal for numbers, various things to do with letters (plus X letters alphabetically, cryptoquote type (randomish) transformations that only you know…), insertion of red herrings at known locations… I found it very helpful. I’d pretty much hand over my book of logins, PWs and account numbers to anyone OTHER than a FWFer and dare them to decipher it. Your average crook would give up in a heartbeat.

Wow, that article is hilarious. So did Davis as a CEO claim on twelve theft occurances for the $1m LifeLock guarantee because he had his identity stolen twelve times after advertising his SSN? If not he should have.

Lesson learned for him. He will have a fun time clearing up all those collection notices.

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I use both Mint and Spreadsheet.

Mint helps keep track of spending and analyzing money flow.
Spreadsheet helps me keep track of my assets and my overall financial well health.

Update spreadsheet once a month with balances on my checking/savings/broker/retirement. Check mint whenever I feel like it.

Maybe put the file(s) on a thumb drive and store it separately. Pop it in when needed.

You could easily run a password manager on a thumb drive like this for a bit more protection.

Badlands, I have started using Fidelity Full View. It is working for most of my accounts, except a few that I have to manually add. I also use Mint off & on, but like others mentioned there are glitches connected.

Can u get your Fidelity FV to print out a copy? For me it will print the first page but will not continue. (could be my machine)

Patty, I couldn’t get Fidelity Full View to print all the accounts either. I did want to print my accounts at the end of the year and had to do a “print screen” for the top accounts and another one for the bottom accounts. There should be a better way, but I don’t know what it is.

What follows is generic advice. I haven’t used Fidelity Full View.

Some websites are not designed correctly for printing. When I can’t get more than one page to print, I try to fit all the information into a single page by scaling it down and printing to a PDF file (using PDFCreator, a free PDF printer driver). You can use print preview to figure out how much you need to scale to fit everything. You can also try using a different web browser, because some are better than others at getting all the contents to print.

I’ve also used Adblock Plus with Element Hiding Helper to selectively remove some page elements that take up too much space or prevent me from printing correctly. You need an older version of Firefox (< 57) to do this now, since 57 and up makes this process a lot more difficult.

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Anybody use financeworks? If so, can you comment on how well it works? I would hate to add all of my accounts if everyone tells me its bad. Apparently, they don’t have their own website, but they are integrated with certain banks. Like, for exmample, ibank, SEFCU, DCU, bankofinternet, Union Bank.

I don’t understand what the benefit would be, but I’m likely missing something.

Intuit’s VP of product management apparently said Mint is better (but he also runs/ran Mint):