Thursday 5 April 2007

A Table of Accounts

I started working on creating a nice looking "table of accounts" to provide a detailed, single-page snapshot of my fiscal situation. This was partly triggered by DW stating that "if you're hit by a bus I won't know what's going on with all your finances". I also want to have a more detailed "snapshot" of my accounts than my overall networth calculation provides. Although initially I'm just creating an excel spreadsheet to display the required information (see below), I'm toying with the idea of writing a .net application (either VB or Java) to display this info. The benefit would be that I could later on add in a webscraper object (eg. WebZinc) to automatically collect the latest figures off the internet (for nearly all the items), which would mean I'd only have to update some figure manually once a month (like my property valuation estimates, and some online data that has overly secure login methods). I don't think I have the time to start on such a hobby project at the moment though - I have some uni assignments due this weekend for the Master of IT and Grad Dip in Seconday Education courses I'm enrolled in.

One thing this chart already shows is that I have overly complicated my life by accumulated lots of surplus accounts in recent times. The three different margin lending accounts were opened as I evolved from starting with just a basic margin loan account to then adding one that also provider online trading access, and then to another from my home loan provider where the interest rate was at a slight discount. Most of the online savings accounts were opened just to get a small opening bonus, or accumulate some referral bonuses. And most of the credit card accounts were opened to make use of 0% balance transfer offers. There are also some cash management accounts that were automatically opened for me when I opened margin loan or brokerage accounts.



An interesting thing I've included which I don't normally consider, are contingent liabilities and contingent assets ie. Capital Gains Tax that would be due if I liquidated my stock investments (I'm still updating my stock transaction log, so I don't even know what this figure is at the moment), the value of my life insurance policy, a guestimate of possible inheritance (although this could easily end up being $0), and the current value of my accumulated annual and long-service leave which would be paid out if I quit my current job.

Enough Wealth

2 comments:

mOOm said...

mOOm said...
Big drops in price earlier in EBI are due to distributions being paid. For Australian investors it's not very tax efficient. Best in a super account of some sort. The rights issue is to raise more money to invest. They also did an institutional placement which was oversubscribed. So no problems there. My next post will be on Everest Brown and Babcock specifically.

Anonymous said...

webzinc is fine but you should try imacros. Works great with Excel VBA.