Expat Wealth Tracker - How do you track your foreign accounts?

[jacob_]

I wanted to share and simultaneously ask for feedback on the following rather simple Google Finance "Expat Wealth Tracker". My goal was to build a simple spreadsheet which I can update monthly (or quarterly) to see how various investments change and keep an overview over all my accounts.

Key features include:

• Categorize your accounts by overarching labels, such as "Cash", "Stock Investments", "Stock Profit", "Crypto Investment", "Crypto Profit", "Real Estate", "Bonus Points" etc., so that you can see how the respective categories change over time.
• Automatic currency conversion to a single standard currency based on current exchange rate (using Google Finance).
• Pie diagram to see your current asset distribution.
• Ability to take regular snapshots, i.e., you need to update your accounts by hand, but then just copy a single column over, so that you can track the history of your finances.
• Stacked chart of your financial history based on taking above snapshots.
• Ability to auto-import data from other spreadsheet (e.g., investment tracker etc.), so that you don't need to update these rows by hand.

https://preview.redd.it/l9dpab6nlk9...bp&s=9f905cb1998312e57568a6665ae1354d666bbbc4

Link to Spreadsheet with ability to make a copy for your own use.

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for improvement? Any other ideas?​

I'm still working on some additional functions and plan to also build an investment portfolio tracker, which can then be linked using Google Spreadsheet import functions. None of the functions should be third-party, so that everything stays private (as long as you trust Google).

 

[resjudicata]

@jacob_ Looks pretty!

I'm doing quite the same, only that I don't track profit, only current values and calculate a net present value that I index against my FIRE target.

Profits are visible nicely in my brokerage account that I need to access regardless to update the figures, so I see no point in showing it in the overview.

I've integrated a monthly budget though to calculate my savings potential, I update my expenses quarterly (income whenever it happens) and increase my stock savings plans accordingly.

 

[jacob_]

@resjudicata Thanks!

I like to seperate profits, so that i can also look at the base line of "savings without profits". Because the overall wealth will fluctuate a lot, so it's great to see how the base capital grows steadily (while profits on top move up and down).

I'm thinking of building something that connects to other spreadsheets, e.g.:

• Stock Investment Tracker - the perfect solution would be if I could automatically import Interactive Brokers transaction into Google Spreadsheets, so that I have everything up to date.
• Crypto Investment Tracker - again it would be cool to automatically show all data etc. and import data from a wallet and/or a crypto exchange.
• Budget Tracker - a tracker of all expenses plus income to actually balance everything. For US credit cards, one can export data or maybe even use some API to link to MINT. For other countries, it's probably going to be more difficult.

Perfect solution would update automatically. Of course, there are already apps for this, but as far as I know none of them will be as flexible as a spreadsheet and it's also unlikely that they will work with as many countries.

 

[skeptonaut]

@jacob_ Wait, you're making a profit with your investments? I just keep blowing every pay cheque on option calls for GME and losing it all.

 

[jacob_]

@skeptonaut No, those values are simulated. I also only blow my cash on GME and AMC to shout "YOLO!".

 

[john_geeshu]

@jacob_ I was taking a similar approach with spreadsheets but gave up and we built a free app in www.exirio.com that tries to provide a more user friendly and powerful approach.

 

[jacob_]

@john_geeshu This looks interesting - I will check it out. I guess you won't be sharing the source code on github?

The main advantage of a spreadsheet is that even a lay person without coding knowledge can make lots of adjustments and at the same time has full control about the data (and even decide if they want to use it in the cloud, where Google has access or only on their own computer).

Another important question is the file format. Will it be easy to export all the data from the app in a standardized way, which can then be imported into another app or a personal spreadsheet?

 

[john_geeshu]

@jacob_ I don't think source code would help. There's a big infrastructure of different servers, databases, price feeds, connections to third party institutions, security controls, etc. It would be hard to replicate and maintain for an individual and we don't have public documentation for it.
But to your data export question: 100% yes, any data table of Holdings, Transactions, Valuations, etc. can be downloaded in standard CSV format with one click. It's your data.