Amassing the cash to either pay off our current mortgage or sell our old house and buy a new one in cash, is crucial to the plan though. Contributions from here until retirement are not crucial to the success of my retirement plan. As a result, I’ll probably stop contributing to the Roth IRAs. It’s not that bad… but then again, serving longer would not be ideal for my mental state.
LOL! I’ve made it sound like a prison sentence. I need to fill that savings shortfall quickly and permanently for the next three years if I don’t want to find myself serving in the military longer than intended. A grade of 85% might earn a pass in school, but it won’t get me to retirement within my four-year timeline … which is actually three years, now that I think about it. We missed our target by approximately 15%. Even if I count the $11K contribution to our Roth IRAs, we still fell $10K short. Let’s be honest though, those silver linings aside, my family and I came nowhere close to hitting our savings goal. Good job Grumpus! You totally did something worthwhile without even thinking about it.
Maybe if I did this on a monthly basis, it might only take a few hours? Regardless, although not necessarily intentional, it was prudent of me to download the Quicken data routinely … even if I was not using it actively at the time. Thus, if I’m willing to forego the detailed insight that sub-categorizing provides, I could get away with less work. It only took me a day to reconstruct an entire year accurately enough to make my calculations. One other positive result of the experiment was the realization that as long as I had the data, it was rather easy to quickly manipulate and segregate it into large categories using Quicken. Maybe I can still find time to blog after all? That was achieved without tracking the spending nearly as closely as the previous 18 years. Therefore, a bit of good news is that Grumpus Familias didn’t necessarily spend any more in 2017 than we did in 2016. Of course, I had to adjust for the unintentionally deferred income from 2016 that made its way into 2017 (again mentioned in the previous article). I say “mostly a failure” rather than “a complete failure” because once I compared my net savings from 2016 to 2017 in Quicken, the totals appeared almost equal. What does that $45K net savings (after Roth contributions) tell me? First, it tells me the Passive Money Tracking Experiment was mostly a failure. Quicken’s annual Cash Flow report, which I trust since I control the input My Saving’s Grace As a result, I trust this number, as I know exactly what data it represents.
On the plus side everything in Quicken is modifiable, so the user gets to determine what is, or isn’t, included in the report. This total is way short of my $66.5K goal whose importance I chronicled in Track Your Money Part 3. After subtracting our $11K of Roth, annual net cash savings fell to approximately $45K. After reconstructing the year, the “Cash Flow” report shows that my family’s total net savings for 2017 (excluding investment income) was approximately $56K. As a result, I don’t trust this number any more than the previous one.
However, I still cannot verify exactly how Mint determines expenses and income for this report. Obviously, I had approximately $1K of transactions mislabeled in my previous report. After spending a few days double checking entries, modifying several transaction labels, and re-displaying reports Mint now shows an annual net savings of $69.5K. The program, as far I could tell, didn’t allow for that determination. However, I didn’t trust that number due to my inability to verify whether or not Mint accounted for our annual Roth IRA transfer. To refresh everyone’s memory, when I initially ran Grumpus Familias’s net savings for 2017 through Mint as part of my annual end of year fiscal review, it reported we saved $70.5K. The now infamous Net Income Over Time report display Doing so allowed me to total my net savings for the year in Quicken and verify if I made any mistakes with my Mint calculations.
I spent several days prior to writing this article improving the fidelity of my data in my account. I also rebuilt my entire 2017 financial year in Quicken. This is especially crucial considering the importance I place on tracking money, to begin with. However, much like Darrow Kirkpatrick did with retirement calculators, I believe it’s important to understand the pluses and minuses associated with popular money tracking software. Apologies to those of you who don’t enjoy these articles as much as some of my others. As a result of the problems identified in my previous article with ’s annual “Net Savings Over Time” report, I decided to nerd out on money tracking again.