Out of curiosity - how are you making the Sankey charts? Are they based on manually compiled data?
Managing Personal Finances: Budgeting, Spending, Banks, Loans, & Credit
- Thread starter Skoop
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The Sankey charts are made here, the interface is pretty sweet! https://sankeymatic.com/build/
I've got an ancient MS Access database (I know!) that I made 25-30 years ago with VBA (i KNOW!) routines/queries that import/categorize OFX/QFX files (allowing overrides), so I can run arbitrary/monthly/yearly reports. So every month I spend about 10 minutes importing files. Generally there's a primary category (which the Sankey is based on) and a sub-category, sorta like 1Fun, 2Dining.
Gnucash (another plug!) produces the data for Sankey charts across arbitrary categories and time periods with a single click.
I think I've tried gnucash before (but it was a while back) but I don't remember why I didnt' adopt it... I still have the installer in my utils folder. I guess once you have something customized for yourself it's hard to go back haha.
Yeah I'm tempted to try Monarch. I love Homebank, but it's effort and I'm running out of time as "Finance is my hobby" to "I just need this to work"
Excel's 1 million rows, Google Sheets is 10 million rows. How many transactions does your household have?
Ahhh, somehow thought it was less but yup, Excel has 1 million rows!
Maybe I do all my transactions in pennies?!
Excel had a limit of 65,536 rows for many, many, many years. Back when Quattro Pro would advertise 1 million+ rows. [Edit: I think Quattro Pro's file size was only limited by the amount of RAM available.]Ahhh, somehow thought it was less but yup, Excel has 1 million rows!
Maybe I do all my transactions in pennies?!
It wasn't until Excel 2003 or maybe even later that they expanded the number of rows beyond 65,536. Maybe with OOXML/.XLSX file format?
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It was after Excel 2003. I know because the AS/400 I used to admin would only accept .xls files in the 2003 format (not xlsx), and I regularly had to break up files for upload into 65k rows per file.
OK, but IMO once you get a few tens of thousands of rows in, Excel slows down sufficiently as to be unusable.
Depends on your work computer, I suppose. There are days it's an effort for it to open Teams.
Welp, since my employer has 401k at Empower, guess my balance is dragging the average upwards. That's nice to see! Maxing out 401k for the last several years really is helping that.
I think next year (have some things this year), I should start a regular Roth, post-tax dollars, so I could have a mix of taxed & untaxed retirement withdrawals.
As a fairly recent hire at $current_job, I have <$100k in my 401k, but many times that in rollover IRAs managed separately. It seems like there must be a lot of people like me who muddy up the stats...unless people really roll over money from one job's 401k to the next?
That's actually what I have done. Although perhaps I should consider rolling over into a separate account that's only under my control. Hrm.
You say that like there's a downside.... I did this when I switched jobs a while back. Seems convenient. Am I missing something?
EDIT: Reading about it, I discovered that you can roll your Rollover IRA back into a 401k. Reasons listed for wanting to do this: preparing for a mega backdoor Roth conversion and accessing your money more easily if you retire early. Both of which seem like things people here might be interested in.
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Same here. My current employer (of 4 years) uses Empower, but all my previous employers used Fidelity. There's no way I'm rolling out of Fidelity into Empower.
Aside from the Roth piece, not all 401(k)s are created equal - particularly in terms of investment options. IRAs tend to give a ton more flexibility on that front and there isn't really any benefit to having the money in a 401(k) with limited investment options vs an IRA where you can invest in wtfever (excepting if you're planning a conversion).
Historically I have had far better investment choices available with IRA custodians like Fidelity than I did at my 401k. Even now when my 401k is also hosted with Fidelity, I can invest in virtually whatever I want in my IRA, but I still have a limited set of funds to choose from in my 401k. There might have been a time where working at a big company gave you access to low expense funds that you might not have been able to invest in privately, but it seems like those days are long past.
I could see backdoor conversions and/or accessing money during early retirement being compelling reasons to roll into current 401k, though.
My 401k plan recently enabled the SDBA/PCRA thing, so I can invest in pretty much anything except leveraged stuff like options.
At least a few of the big ones offer it. ADP, Empower, Fidelity, probably many others.
It is up to the company/plan itself as to whether it is enabled or not. Mine didn't enable it until 2025.
When we were working, Mrs. Skoop's HR manager chose the fiduciary for their company 401ks when they were establishing the program. Said manager was financially illiterate.
All the funds were actively managed with expense ratios that made John Bogle spin in his grave.
Supposedly 401K provides more legal protection than rollover IRA. So, if you worry that you may get into legal problem, may be keep money in 401K is a good idea.
Probably in an era when kickbacks and personal inducements from the custodian to the company and the relevant executive were even more common and acceptable than they are today. Has ERISA even been amended to ban those sorts of grift, yet?
And you can often get incentives for opening/funding an IRA.
Example: Merrill Edge/Bank of America is currently offering $600* for moving $200k+ of IRA there (and lower incentives for lower amounts). Normally no fees, and once linked - the IRA assets count toward your BoA Preferred Rewards customer bonuses. At the $100k+ "Platinum" level, Preferred Rewards status means a 75% bonus on credit card cash back (plus some other generally irrelevant things)
How it works, simple version: The generic "Unlimited" cash back card offers 1.5% cash back on all purchases, no limits. At Platinum customer level, you're getting 2.625% cash back anywhere on all purchases.
If you don't mind playing categories, you can get the "Custom Cash" card with a base 3% back in the category of your choice, which becomes 5.25%. Note that there's a cap of $2,500 spend per quarter for the 3%/5.25% cash back.
*It varies. I've seen $1000 before at ME, but that generally requires already having BoA status. Not always. Or go somewhere else for other incentives.
As I mentioned before, I managed to get our 401k provider to offer lower cost funds by writing them a letter and pointing out their fiduciary duty - and showing how equivalent mutual funds could be had for a MUCH lower expense ratio.
Not that they admitted I was the reason, but the timing was spot on.
OT1H: So January was the first month in 3? 4? years that monthly cashflow hasn't covered expenses. Not a huge surprise -- while daycare was a higher baseline monthly spend, post daycare is a lot more lumpy -- due to school schedules and whatnot, we pay for a lot of summer camp (mostly deposits) and almost all of our yearly travel in January. I did not anticipate the degree to which that would be the case a few years ago! So we moved a small amount of money from savings backwards into the checking account.
Not a great feeling, but absolutely 0th world problems.
OTOH: I started tracking NW in July of last year. Despite taking this teensy step backwards, the liquid NW is up by more than our net income for January. It's a weird thing to observe, because it's so abstract and disconnected from day-to-day reality. But it's also a nice "Shut up, idiot" reality check when I'm like "ehh what a terrible financial month".
Ironically, it's the abstract stuff that matters more than the day-to-day details.
Not a great feeling, but absolutely 0th world problems.
OTOH: I started tracking NW in July of last year. Despite taking this teensy step backwards, the liquid NW is up by more than our net income for January. It's a weird thing to observe, because it's so abstract and disconnected from day-to-day reality. But it's also a nice "Shut up, idiot" reality check when I'm like "ehh what a terrible financial month".
Ironically, it's the abstract stuff that matters more than the day-to-day details.
We've been tracking our net worth (monthly) for several years. It is weird how dissociated it is from the actual "what did we make / spend this month".
For those of you with young kids, I wanted to share that I am learning through experience that the biggest benefit of 529 accounts is not (was not) the tax advantage when you put the money in, nor the tax advantage when you pull the money out, but the tax advantage of not having to liquidate other investments when it comes time to pay the colleges in question.
I'm sure this varies depending on one's individual financial situation, so let's say ours is where our one salary covers expenses (basically), so college is being paid by liquidating RSUs and other taxable investments (it's complicated). If we had funded our 529s much more (unclear if we could have, but if), we'd be in a more advantaged tax situation.
I'm sure this varies depending on one's individual financial situation, so let's say ours is where our one salary covers expenses (basically), so college is being paid by liquidating RSUs and other taxable investments (it's complicated). If we had funded our 529s much more (unclear if we could have, but if), we'd be in a more advantaged tax situation.
That makes a lot of sense, and is exactly the kind of thing that's obvious in hindsight but not necessarily until you hit that milestone! Thanks for sharing.