Anybody here used “Tiller”? I have seen it mentioned some but have not looked into it.
I don’t pull transactions. I don’t have that many in banks, just reconcile my checking account balance. I have too many at brokers, but I can pull those directly via broker download if I want to run stats on them.
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A bit of both different account types and brokers. For starters DH and I have similar setups and work at the same place so multiply many account types by two. Second, we cannot really roll over most of them for various reasons. In the end, we have 2 traditional IRAs at Vanguard, two taxable account at Vanguard, at Fidelity, 2 Roth IRAs, 2 403b accounts, 2 401a accounts, 2 HSA accounts, 5x 529 plans for 3 kids (3 in one state, 2 in another state from when we only had two kids and lived in another state).
We could have merged the 529 plans somewhat but it was easier this way to keep equal contributions to each account (so we’re not accidentally contributing more to one kid’s account than the others). And we get higher state tax deductions on our contributions with this setup.
One issue with employer-based accounts is not all have access to the same investment options so it’s hard to balance diversification sometimes and we ended up with 3-5 mutual funds in each account.
Now for the self-inflicted wounds, both of us think we can outperform the other in investing so 20+ year running experiment is to find out who gets bragging rights for the largest portfolio at retirement age! I was not first at the million mark but lately I’ve been doing better just passed DH by about $22k! If we mirrored investments 100%, that’d probably save us some bookkeeping but still the accounts have to be in separate names so it would not shrink the number of accounts much.
Are you daytrading in those accounts? Probably not in the 529s, right? All you really need to do to keep track of those is look at the monthly, quarterly, or annual statements.
Yes we don’t need to check those 529 accounts daily since we don’t trade on them at all (very few options to start with anyway).
But at some point if we’re updating daily quotes for all the other accounts automatically, might as well do it for those too. I’d rather not do a mixed system where I keep track of some transactions in one app and then keep track of other accounts in another based on frequency of activity.
Which is why we’re using Personal Capital. The budgeting features are weak on it but we’re not budgeting as much as checking annual spending reports which it does fine. And for all other accounts, it does check quotes, positions, balances and transactions quickly and accurately in a cost efficient way (free). We migrated from a long time use of Quicken due to PC being more accurate on importing transactions (aka less work fixing the import errors), accessibility on phones, and Quicken’s change to a fairly expensive sub model now.
If you already use personal capital, my guess would be it would be easier to try to link your excel to that, and not to each individual bank. Is that possible? Or is the idea to get away from personal capital?
I’m not so much looking to get away from Personal Capital at this point but I was just curious on alternative systems that would be more independent from a single company/software. Basically, my experience with Quicken proved to me that I have a system that I’m not in control of, neither in process nor in cost (even if there are none currently). So I was curious to see if I could somewhat replace our current setup with excel spreadsheets or other tools.
But my guess is as long as I want to maintain more automated importing of transactions, I have to relinquish some control for that convenience.
As far as exporting from Personal Capital, I’ve read that you can export transactions to a CSV file. So I guess that could work but I have not tried it. It could save you from logging into many banks. You’d only use PC as aggregator for all transactions. Although I don’t know how the CSV would look like and thus how easy it’d be to import them into excel but it may save some manual entry.
So it bugged me enough to look into exporting to CSV. The file has mainly 6 columns, Date, Account (nickname), Description (vendor or type), Category, Tags (no idea what this one is for - was empty in my file), and Amount.
So it should not be too hard to sort by account, then import into a spreadsheet (maybe where each tab is an account).
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At the risk of showing my ignorance or paranoia, I’ve got to ask about Yodlee and similar services. Do you have to give them your bank / brokerage / cc account numbers and login credentials for them to pull your data? They then have complete access, and therefore control, of your account, no?
Yes, I think so. I am not overly familiar with Yodlee… I think it operates similar to Mint.com or PersonalCapital.com. Both connect to your accounts periodically to pull transactions.
HTH.
Really? Typically those challenge questions are only for resetting your password, or authenticating a voice call. I did not know any consolidator would ask for those. Quite surprised.
The solution to this would be if all financial institutions supported the concept of a read only variation of your username, e.g. “StatGren-RO” with a separate password that had read only access to your data.
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+1. Maybe we should start a list of those. I have 1-2 like that but honestly don’t know which ones they are.
This was a while ago, so not sure if it’s still the same, but yodlee had direct communications with banks, so the banks would authorize a type of read only access.
For banks they didn’t have that connection with, they would theoretically have access to your account, but they would just pull feeds of transactions and use spiders to crawl your account transactions.
I am hesitant to provide credentials to anyone that would then have the ability to access my accounts as if they were me no matter what they said about what they intended to do with it.
This is a case-by-case risk management situation, though, and I confess to being inconsistent. I do provide my credentials within Quicken because I highly value what that enables. I also enter credentials while using a Chrome browser, so the likes of Google has access to it - could it be any worse? That said, I don’t provide credentials to any aggregator, and enter my holdings manually for any online tool that I am using (e.g. a portfolio analysis tool).
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It would be quite scandalous if the browser was phoning home users’ credentials.
We already know Google does exactly that (unless you disable credentials syncing across devices).
And Google sold Nest Secure for the home that had a hidden microphone in it.
Nefarious intent? Well, I’d say borderline. But I’ve just come to terms with the fact that Google is notified every time I walk down the hall in my house.
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This isn’t what I meant. This is a purposeful service they provide that gives you control, not a hidden and unconditional stealing of your credentials.
The Nest microphone did cause a stir, and I’m guessing they’ll end up paying for it.
Does anyone know if there is a real Chrome problem? I heard some folks complaining at work about some horrible, malicious thing Google was doing with Chrome. I don’t use Chrome so didn’t bother looking into it yet.
All I know is some recent “bad” news where they were going to block ad-blocking extensions. But they changed their mind.
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No, I am not aware of a credible allegation of a privacy atrocity specific to the user credentials that Google captures in the Chrome browser. My point was that we give Google lots and lots of data that is personal or that could provide them access to financial information and ability to transact. Couple this with Google’s less than stellar respect for privacy does give one pause to think about this.
And I wasn’t kidding about Google knowing each time I walk down the hall. Looking at the data that Google is keeping on me (that they are confessing to keeping on me), I find that I walked down the hall to pee at 4:38:24.722 (UTC) on May 2 of last year. I had totally forgotten about that. Google has not.
2018-05-02T04:38:24.722Z 2018-05-02T04:38:30.708Z Pathlight Duration milliseconds: 5986
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