I realized a few years ago that I had no way of tracking my financial assets and liabilities. And I often have this conversation with people about how clueless I was despite having the tools for tracking at my disposal. So I built ("built" is an overstatement for what I did) a tracker sheet which helped me with this. I decided to clean it up and post it here. As an exercise, it is quite meditative:D
Some basic things I follow to populate this:
I do this at the same time every month. It is best to do it on 1st, 15 or last day of the month. Sometimes you know weekends may cause issues with scheduled bill payments or SIPs. But that is okay for our exercise
I consolidate all those accounts which I consider as mine from the viewpoint of decision making. You could do this exercise for your household as well or just for your own accounts.
The first time I did it in 2011, I went and closed one bank account! So take it as an exercise in weeding out unused accounts and do some consolidation.
I do this to identify my current networth. So I try and note down latest values of everything, including outstanding liabilities and assets. In other words, My loan value will be the principal outstanding - which is what I will pay today to close my account. Similarly the MF/Equity value will be the most recent, and if I cannot get latest FD values, I usually stick with principal amounts (this is my only exception)
Sources of data:
Bank balances are from bank accounts (kind of obvious) - and this can include SB, FD, PPF and NPS accounts. Same for loan accounts too.
MF Values are from consolidated account statements from CAMS/KARVY or the NSDL e-CAS.
Demat balances can be from NSDL e-CAS, but I use the holdings from the demat accounts most of the time
ULIPs can be from your FI, I cant say much since I am not fond of ULIPs and do not invest in them
I get EPF balance via SMS or by logging into the website
I have some other investments like invoice discounting which I just keep as line items since I want to monitor my exposure there, but I do have some FDs via ICICI direct, which i capture through ICICI direct and "FDs" rather than a seperate line item
For credit card, i take billed+unbilled amount. For loans I reccomend you to take principal outstanding as of date of computation
I would love to hear feedback on if this helped you take stock. Feel free to create your own template using this - this one is really the simplest of them all and may not meet your purpose. But I hope it gets you started on measuring where you have money!
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