Aggregate Percent of Change of Net Worth

Jeff76

Prior to Quicken I used spreadsheets to keep track of my finances. The one thing that I still need a spreadsheet to show me however, is my aggregate percentage of change in net worth over a period of time. Yes, Quicken shows me my net worth at a period of time, but what it does not tell me is how (in percentage terms) my net worth has changed over that period of time. For instance say my net worth increased 12% between 2000-2008. Then between 2008-2010 it decreased 10%. I still need to use spreadsheet to plug in my net worth at the end of each of those 10 years to see my aggregate percentage of change in net worth over that period of time. I have been suggesting this simple enhancement to Quicken for years now to no avail. Seems to me a lot of people would find that information useful for planning purposes. Once you know your rate of change it is much easier to project when you will hit a target number.

Jim_Harman

Have you looked at Quicken's Lifetime Planner? That does a pretty good of predicting your future net worth both pre and post retirement. Like other planning tools, its results depend strongly on your projected income and expenses and the assumed growth rate of your investments. You can use the Investment Performance Report to see the historic average annual percentage return of your investments.

If you want to see percentage changes in your net worth, it is easy to export the Net Worth report to Excel and do whatever calculations you want there, so you don't need to type in any numbers.

Jeff76

Thanks Jim, and yes I do like the retirement planner. It brings in a lot variables, and yes I can export out into Excel, but I think it would helpful to have a canned report built in Quicken that shows something like this:

Year	$ Change	Year End Net Worth	% Change
2017	$50,000	$150,000
2018	$30,000	$180,000	20.00%
2019	$20,000	$200,000	11.11%
2020	$30,000	$230,000	15.00%
2021	-$10,000	$220,000	-4.35%
2022	$40,000	$260,000	18.18%
2023	-$20,000	$240,000	-7.69%
Net Worth Goal		$300,000	25.00%
Years to reach Goal/ %/Yr	4	Past 7 yr Ave	5.99%
Goal Year/ Total %	2027
$ to Reach Net Worth Goal	$60,000	Aggregate	7.00%

Chris_QPW

I disagree the Lifetime Planner isn't the right tool, at least not how it is coded now, and for that matter I disagree that is that good of a tool for predicting your future net worth, but of course people and disagree with that.

First off, to this actual question, the Lifetime Planner only goes from today into the future. That is all well and good, but what is really needed is to be able to also look at the past. And lacking that, is the main reason I don't feel that it is as good of tool as most people think it is.

There are two major numbers that one puts into the Lifetime Planner, inflation, and rate of return. How many people do you think really know what their person inflation number is? This is an extremely hard number to tease out of your data. People instead use numbers like the CPI which frankly for a number of reasons is highly unlikely to even be close to your personal inflation number.

What the Lifetime Planner does is use that number to calculate the future value of your net worth. I can put in 1% or 50% and it certainly calculate that number into the future, but will that actually tell me what my net worth will be in 10 years? Only if I put in the inflation number correctly.

The only way you can get any feedback that you have put in the wrong inflation number is by comparing to the past, which the Lifetime Planner doesn't do. One must save copy of their Lifetime data at a certain point, and then in future compare what it predicted to what actually happened. How many people do you know that are actually doing that?

Without that people will blindly believe that the numbers they are putting in are correct. After all, even if the Lifetime Planner had history, it will still be very hard to see if the problem is in the inflation number or in something else like adding or removing money from different accounts than what the Lifetime Planner is using.

@Jeff76 Sorry to take this off track from your original suggestion. About all I can say on that is your best bet is to submit the idea as an "Idea" so that people can vote on it. Go to the Home page and select New Post → New Idea.

It does seem like a useful addition to the net worth report, and one that shouldn't be that hard to put in.

mshiggins

I find the Net Worth graph you can add to a custom Home tab view to be a good way to visualize the increases and decreases over time. It does not present the changes as a percentage, but I find the visual better than a set of numbers in this case.

Jeff76

I agree that graph is useful but it could be made a lot more useful if it also tracked the % of change over time. I took @Chris_QPW's advice and submitted as a new idea for possible future consideration.

mshiggins

@Jeff76 I don’t see any ideas posted by you, can you provide a link to your idea post?

Jeff76

Sure @mshiggins please see attached:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7940066/new-report-graph-that-shows-of-change-in-net-worth