I’m leaving for vacation today. I’m hoping that I’ll be able make a post or two about how the Vacation is impacting me financially. Given that I’m staying at Caneel Bay (by popular demand), the impact is unlikely to be anything but disastrous. However, life isn’t all about being frugal. As much as I’d like to be on semi-regular schedule of daily posts, mostly likely I will only be able to update my blog once or twice in the next week. Do not despair, I will return and with a George Hamiltonesque tan.
The other week I wrote about multiple accounts, mostly because at the time I was trying to create the ultimate spreadsheet to track all my investment accounts. I’m generally pretty happy with the setup I have currently.
- Track all my expenses on credit cards via Yodlee.
- Update my asset and liability values once a month
- Track income and transfers
What I don’t do a great job is really breaking down my investment performance. I don’t have any single spreadsheet that holds all the information. I’ve made several attempts in the past to create the holy grail of investment spreadsheets to only end up giving up on the quest. I’m not sure why I give up every time. Sometimes I think it’s too much work to maintain. This isn’t really true as I tend to be a buy and hold type of guy. I probably do an average of one trade a month besides my scheduled mutual fund purchase. So too much work isn’t really a reason – it’s just an excuse.
I think the real reason is that I’m too ambitious or rather I want my spreadsheet to do all the work for me. In the back of mind, I think if I only had the right spreadsheet I’d be a better investor. Some of this is directly related to the type of work I do. My job effectively is to distill information into to an easily understood form from which I can make decisions. I want my spreadsheet at home to do the same thing that my spreadsheets and databases at work accomplish. On the job, I have a good sense of what metrics I need. At home, I’m not convinced what metrics I want to use to quantify the quality of my portfolio.
Having made the last of these attempts, I think it’s time to go back to the drawing board and simplify. Investing is difficult, and there’s no magic bullet that’s going to tell me what to buy or sell or when to do it. I think instead of making my spreadsheet geared towards performance, I should probably center the spreadsheet to better fit what my investment goals are. Am I meeting my desired income yield? Am I taking on too much risk? Do I have enough liquidity? Research and performance metrics need not be embedded in the spreadsheet. I just need a spreadsheet that tells me how I’m doing, not what I should be doing. I’ll let my brokerage do the work of measuring my performance.
I haven’t given up creating a better analysis framework, I’m just shelving that until I have better framework from which I want to do analysis. I have rough idea of how I wanted to be invested, i.e. asset allocation and risk profile. What I don’t have is the framework to then select the specific investments.
Of course the other thing holding me back is MS Excel on the Mac. I’m a proficient Excel user. I do quite a bit of work in it at my job, and use Visual Basic adeptly if I must say so myself. The Mac version of Excel is crap. It’s awful in ways I can’t even begin to describe. VB is a joke on it. None of the keyboard shortcuts seem to be the same as the Windows version. The only thing better is the default chart colors. Sorry for the rant.
The rollover of my 401k from my old employer to my current employer finally went through. I had some initial difficulties with proper documentation. I had confused my distribution notice with a letter that was titled “distribution notice”. The new 401k people wanted a statement of how I took my distribution (direct rollover with no tax consequences) and instead I gave them a notice saying that my old 401k was eligible for a direct rollover. In any case, after 2 attempts, the 401k is finally rolled over.
I’m a little sad to have closed my first 401k ever, but it was about time for me to rollover. I haven’t been employed by that company in over 5 years, and given that I only had a couple thousand dollars in that account it wasn’t the easiest account to manage. That said it was a great account. It was through Fidelity, and I had established something called a “brokerage-link” which allowed me to make completely self-directed trades in my 401k. Brokeragelink is a great feature, but given that I had a rather small amount, barely about the $5,000 required that allowed me to keep the money in the account. A brokerage account of that size is difficult to manage as transactions costs can be a significant drag on returns.
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