I track everything in Tiller, including my Fidelity investment accounts. I think some people download their investment transactions to a separate sheet so they don’t clutter (anytime anything happens in Fidelity, it seems to involve multiple transactions–say a dividend is paid and then a dividend is reinvested, that is two different transactions), but I haven’t yet felt the need to do that. If you have a lot of investment transactions, that might make sense. But I’m not really seeing any disadvantages of tracking everything in Tiller, and I am very content to have a complete picture.
I like having all my account balances and net worth in one place. The Transactions sheet shows me everything that’s happening in all my accounts. But as dmetiller notes, a single investment action can turn into multiple transactions. The way Fidelity tracks the core settlement account turns into more transactions than you’d expect. I have a specific category for these transactions so it’s easier to ignore them.
Since Tiller doesn’t track the shares involved in investment transactions, you need something else to track your shares, capital gains, etc. I have my own spreadsheet with total shares and price for each investment in each account so I can see a snapshot without logging into my Fidelity account. I have to update the shares manually as needed, while Google Sheets updates the share prices automatically.
@dmetiller@mysterytea Are you able to utilize AutoCat to manage the multiple transactions? Or does the complexity and timing of these transactions require manual review?
I have Autocat setup to catch most of them, and then I manually categorize the ones it misses. Hasn’t been worth the effort to fine tune the rules to get them all. My investment transactions are pretty infrequent, usually just twice a month, so it’s not a huge burden.
My response then is pretty much the same now, except I’ve streamlined the monthly balance updates a bit.
I connected our investment accounts for a while, but it created too much noise in my transaction list, so I disconnected them. However, since I want our investment accounts included in our net worth report, I added them as manual accounts and update their balances once a month. This way I can see the trend of our net worth and see our assets breakdown, including Retirement and Non-Retiremet Investments.
I don’t use AutoCat at all. I find it makes me pay closer attention to my transactions when I have to categorize them myself, and it doesn’t take that long to do. If I did, I think it would be pretty simple to create rules that would automatically deal with the Fidelity transactions.
Also a Fidelity customer with 10 linked accounts plus 2 Fidelity credit cards.
Only 2 of those 10 accounts have transactions that I spend time placing into categories (checks, deposits, auto-pays, etc), but I download all transactions for all accounts.
I am deleting the Core Redemption/Purchase transactions that started downloading after Fidelity joined the Open Banking group. I have an “Investment Transactions” category that I hide from reports that catch all the various buy/sells and dividends/reinvestments. Sometimes the activity level is high, but not overwhelming to manage without AutoCat. For managing any investment analysis, I use the tools at Fidelity for that.
I use Tiller to track all Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard retirement monies. You can have Tiller link different accounts to different spreadsheets and then each spreadsheet is totally separate. I don’t budget from the retirement stuff but I do track all the items there. I realllllyyyyy wish Tiller (Yodlee really) would download all the transaction data (number of shares specifically) b/c right now I have to enter that manually which is laborious.
In my retirement spreadsheet I have it do monte-carlo sims for future prediction etc and I really don’t want any of that in my budget spreadsheet since the MC data is huge.
@imthenachoman I think you would be right to keep the investment data separate from your non-investment data, for now.
As far as pro’s and con’s go:
I keep my IRA investments, which are in Personal Capital / Empower Personal Dashboard, separate from Tiller. Their retirement planner is the platform’s strength for me as a tool and planner. It would be hard to match this functionality in another tool given they are basically the source of the data. I see a lot of the free users trying to use Empower as a single platform to aggregate all their external investments and non-investment data. Their frustration is high given the dependency on one aggregator and the limitations of any customization within the tool. I don’t have personal experience with Fidelity Full View. However, I would imagine their tool’s strength would conceptually be the same decision point as Empower was for me.
I really like what people are doing within Tiller related to managing / tracking their investments. The power and strength of using spreadsheets in Tiller provides the opportunity to build a more robust and customizable investment tracking tool over time. The ground work is being laid with the reports, sheets and dashboards being built to meet specific needs within the scope of the available investment data. As Tiller adds another aggregator, the opportunity for more investment data integration may move the needle towards having a single financial view.
Tiller is designed for tracking budgets and expenses, that is its strength so I use Tiller for this purpose.
In addition to my BofA and Credit Cards, which reflect my expenses, I have set up several sheets as follows:
Schwab Accounts in one Tiller Sheet
Fidelity Accounts in another tiller sheet
Wealthfront cash account in a separate sheet
All of the above combined into a separate master sheet which then consolidates all investment accounts.
I have not found any easy way to build Autocat for dividend tracking or anything like that.
I use the master sheet as a tracker for total investments but honestly I think Empower is far better for this purpose.
Conclusion: Tiller is fantastic for expense tracking and budgeting and Empower for investment tracking.
I use New Retirement for retirement planning…NR cant be beat by any other tool…
It might, but I don’t use pivot tables in my Tiller sheet. I mostly just look at my data on the Simple Investment Calculator and the Yearly Insights sheets.