RetireJapan

Hi all,

What software do you use to keep track of the money you've saved and invested? Just Excel, or is there something that's a bit smarter in terms of tracking exchange rate effects (for overseas ETFs, etc.), purchase and sale commissions, and all that?

I'm in the market for the long term, so I'm not interested in tracking movement on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis. Also, I don't need household budget functions since that's already taken care of. Just something that can give me an accurate picture of my current holdings and perhaps show some graphs (historical and predicted).

Mac software is preferred but I can handle Windows suggestions as well.

Money Forward or Money Tree are your best bets in Japan.

EDIT: Saw your overseas requirements. Assuming you purchase it via Japan brokers, the above holds true, but it does not keep track of commissions (but if you are in it long term it wouldn't matter that much) nor makes nice enough graphs . Bloomberg Market is a website where you can store your entry price and give you a good comprehensive outlook on most global stocks.

Thanks for that. I had a quick look at both of those, but they seem a bit too focused on "manage your whole budget via this app" than what I'm looking for. I couldn't find the part of the Bloomberg site that allows you to manage your portfolio...

However, at least I did finally remember the word "portfolio" so that gives me extra ammunition for consulting Google.

I tried looking for something similar but never had much success. If it's only ETFs or stocks you're looking at, then there should be a few US ones that have access to Japanese market data, but if you've got money in Japanese domiciled funds, none of those options will work, and it seems most Japanese sites with that data with API access are paywalled, so no one can really do a similar thing here. I tried using google sheets to call different websites and parse values, but google discontinued it's in house API calls for Japanese markets, and parsing websites can be broken as soon as a website changes it's layout.

I am doing my stuff in Excel.

The main benefit, is that I became quite proficient in some features of Excel! Nice charts and such - value in yen, value in foreign currency, mark-to-market values etc. It looks like a disaster the year I bought my home.
But as I try new things and take out mortgages open bank accounts and broker accounts, maintaining the thing is quite a challenge. I only update it once a month, manually.

I want to do it more as a balance sheet at some point, but then I will have the issue of deciding what the value of my home is...

I've tried excel now and then, but I'm not enough of a whiz at it.

An alternative might be google docs/drive. I think a sheet there can pick up daily prices and f/x.

Yahoo finance allows you to build/customize/track a portfolio. Certainly US markets, not sure if it does foreign.

One of the benefits of my work at previous companies is that I became a serious Excel power-user - as in, I rarely need to use the mouse to do anything, and I'm very familiar with v-lookup and pivot tables (and I also learned far more than I care to admit to from using Excel to track my fantasy baseball teams...)So I use Excel to track my monthly budget, annual cash flow plan, retirement planning and of course investments. A lot of software programs struggle with multi-currency portfolios; Excel allows for a lot more flexibility.

I've been revising my Excel over the years, and there are still aspects I'd like to tweak. If anyone's interested I don't mind sharing it as a template (although I suspect most people aren't the Excel / math geek (nerd) that I am....)

If you prefer Mac I’ve been happy for several years with the unfortunately-named Banktivity (used to be iBank), available from the IGG Software site and the Apple Store for $64.99 & updates are usually free or just a few bucks for a registered user. It won’t automatically download data from Japanese institutions and probably would need tweaking to handle Japanese securities, but it does get automatic and accurate data for any US or Canadian security I’ve thrown at it and automatically updates FX in multiple currencies, ¥ amongst them. I think it’s the only programme available for Mac which easily handles different accounts in different currencies, & I haven’t minded manually entering buy, sell, dividend, & interest events myself. Once that’s done it does a good job keeping things up to date.

The charts & graphs aren’t as robust as the old Quicken ones before Intuit stopped making anything that makes sense for a Mac, but they’re not bad. It’s also set up to do ‘household budget functions’ but I don’t use it for that.

I also keep a free Morningstar portfolio & various other related things in Excel, & the combo works for me.

DragonAsh wrote: ↑Fri Apr 20, 2018 12:20 am \I've been revising my Excel over the years, and there are still aspects I'd like to tweak. If anyone's interested I don't mind sharing it as a template (although I suspect most people aren't the Excel / math geek (nerd) that I am....)

I've just finished my application for my NISA and I'm super interested by your template if you don't mind sharing it!
I'm also quite used to pivot tables and vlookup so it should be easily understandable for me^^
Do you update your source data daily, weekly or monthly?

PS: Btw I'm also a Dragon Ash fan hehe! I also had the opportunity to shoot them in one-man and festivals a few times!