Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

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I definitely like it. Because I like Civilization, and because I like when you think about the direction and velocity of your (net worth, savings, call it what you want) rather than "what rules should I put in place and follow?"

I've been tracking my spending (cash not withstanding) since 2003, and my favorite part is looking at net worth changes per month, and how they change over time. For example, if I look at 7 years, I see that I've got a rate of $xxx but if I just look at the past 12 months it's now a much better rate of $xxxx! Occasionally, a single day looks awful... every three months I track changes to investment values and dividends paid out. And the past year and a half or so has been negative almost every time! Those days "suck" but I can still look at "how it's going in the big picture" and know we're doing alright. We're headed in the right direction.

I hope more people try approaches like yours.

Unless your dealing with leveraged investments, day to day swings mean very little. Occasionally the market has a huge drop, but right after a big drop tends to be the best times to invest in the stock market. However, mentally people feel the need to double down when it's up and take money out when it's down which can quickly destroy decades of growth.

PS: If you can see a 60% drop and think, yay! great time to invest then feel free. Otherwise, checking once a year is probably fine.

I was initially an overly conservative investor, really couldn't accept any risk or loss (I'm young), but tracking day to day swings helped me quite a bit. Something about seeing changes every day, many of them negative, really hit home the meaningless of those changes given timescale I was operating on. I am now a much healthier investor.

This is one of the big points Ben Graham makes in the classic book The Intelligent Investor -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intelligent_Investor

Essentially -- unrealized losses don't matter unless they are uncover-able losses.

Exactly. In a weird way, it feels a little more like physics - like you are tracking the position and momentum of a single rigid object while all kinds of things are trying to move it forwards and backwards.

Might I ask what software you use to do that, if any?

I wrote it in T-SQL and classic ASP, and I've never updated it. It's hosted on a server in my basement (Server 2008 w/ SQL Server 2008 ). It's a little clunky. I also use PersonalCapital.com to see the pretty graphs. I've always wanted to write something more elegant and securely shareable for other people to use, but it has never been enough of a priority.

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