How do you aggregate personal finances w/ property investments?

Question

I’m going to cross post this in a few places, and to be clear, I am NOT talking about software or a bookkeeper that specializes at any of the following:

• bookkeeping for taxes
• rent roll and property management
• property purchase assessment
• renovation budgets and build management
• traditional stock market investments
• business management
• personal finances

I am looking to take information from all of the above areas and create a holistic cash flow, net worth, short term and long-term automated projection of EVERYTHING all at once.  So if you have COVID-19 shutdown or you are looking to buy a new property, you can see how this affects your entire financial big picture (not evaluate one financial silo at a time).  The only way I know to do that is to dump info from the software above into a big ugly custom spreadsheet I’ve been using.  It’s tedious and slow and I dread dealing with it.

What are you actually USING?  Are we just stuck with spreadsheets to put it all together?

Ben Arritt

Benjamin Arritt · Answer

BP of course has purchase assessment calculators and I thought this was pretty good: https://dealcheck.io/

Benjamin Arritt · Answer

If you add or subtract anything or sometimes even move where things are located you will get #REF errors or worse, it will pull the wrong number and you won't realize it.  Invariably there will be some sheet or part of a formula that is pulling from the wrong thing and I'm tracing things back to where the error started.  If I want to "sell" a property, I've got to manually update things and a lot of the nested IF statements are a pain, etc.  If you know how to get Excel to sync with accounts, that's pretty nice.  I assumed some kind of SQL code or moving to Access would be required...but that is not the main problem. It's changes and running scenarios then dealing with all the broken links.

Nick Peters · Answer

@Benjamin Arritt I haven't made that master spreadsheet public (too specific to my own needs). The other spreadsheets I provide are only related to real estate investing.

But to come back to the tedious aspect of managing everything via spreadsheets, can you be more precise or give examples? What actual tasks do you find tedious? Maybe there's another way (or better way) to do that in excel (and maybe not). That could help even if it doesn't fully answer your initial question, I agree.

Benjamin Arritt · Answer

Well you are a better spreadsheet wizard than me!  I will check out your link....

Nick Peters · Answer

Given the scope of work you're describing and the number of parameters and angles (+ the fact that it's very specific to each user), I would safely say that spreadsheets are still your only viable solution here. Not sure to see what's really tedious about that though (especially once the spreadsheet is built and suited to your needs)?

I use a master spreadsheet for my wealth, personal finance, real estate investments, etc.,  and it does provide the overall picture I need as well as tools to review multiple scenarios automatically. On top of that, everything is linked to my bank accounts so I almost have nothing to update manually.

Benjamin Arritt · Answer

Thanks Mark. I already have a spreadsheet that provides such a snapshot.  It's tedious however to run different scenarios and project where different combinations of decisions leave me in 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 30 years, etc., with the ability to change variables and have the results auto populate across my entire financial big picture.  So I built a spreadsheet that does that too.  Still tedious.  It may be however no one really has a solution beyond clunky spreadsheets...

Mark H. Porter · Answer

You need to download a Personal Financial Statement (PFS) spreadsheet and populate it.  Most banks will ask for one when approving financing anyways.  I just do a sanity check on mine once a month to keep current.

Its usually on a few pages and automatically aggregates into a  nice balance sheet showing debts, assets, and owners' equity.  I have nine apartment buildings, business and personal vehicles, ancillary debt such as home equity lines or secondary construction loans, etc... it all goes on there and gives a great picture

How do you aggregate personal finances w/ property investments?

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