Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management software | Hacker News Reader

Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management software

ghostfol.io

456 pointsfalkaer150 comments

Very neat, excited to take a look, and especially excited that it is self hostable / open source. I've tried a number of services like this, and always end up back on a spreadsheet because:

1. I hate giving my data to a third party

2. There always ends up being some limitation that forces me to exclude part of my assets, doesn't let me handle something the way I wish, etc

Yes same! I've always wanted some "simpler" net worth tracker, still on a spreadsheet at this point.

I never liked the big heavy ones with all the bells/whistle integrations that want your password so they can log directly into your financial accounts. And the integration would always break, causing my net worth to swing by double digit percentage points. I ended up spending more time nursing the integration than actually watching my net worth.

Have you dabbled with plain text accounting systems at all? They seem like the next step after spreadsheets because ease of version control and pipelines to/from.

I expanded my spreadsheet into a webapp https://jch.app. My original thinking was to avoid broken bank syncing, but one problem I still have is how to include assets that aren't publicly listed. For example, have funds in a retirement account that's specific to that institution and can't fetch updated prices. Currently getting around that by using a similar target date fund as a proxy for the price.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what’s the pricing on that? When I see “sign up for free” I’m trained to expect a hidden, costly upsell.

If it’s actually free it may actually be helpful to add a prominent Pricing in the nav, where you explain why it’s free, how you make money (or how you might plan to), and whether there are any catches, like selling all the data to someone (not that you’d likely do that, but if I stumbled upon the site from anywhere else, I might assume a catch exists)

Anyway what I can see of this looks really professional, so nice job! I’m curious to try it!

1. Excel. 2. KeePass. 3. Selenium. 4. VBA.

Yeah I also want an offline portfolio tracker

Offline taxes

guess there’s not enough money in that

You could check out portfolio performance for an offline, open source portfolio tracker.

Anybody care to define "wealth management" as opposed to run-of-the-mill personal accounting? Why would I use this instead of ledger[1], for example?

- [1]: https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html

"Real" wealth management has a lot more legal work behind it since a non trivial portion of wealth management are topics like inheritance and planing for the next generation. Also wealth management is more focused on wealth preservation than generating high returns, that is more the focus of asset management (e.g. hedge funds, private equity etc.). But since this piece of software is focused on the individual the term seems applicable even though something like personal finance would be more suitable. For "real" wealth management you hire usually professionals. It has a lot of good and bad sides that a majority of people think that when it comes to finance they can compete on an equal level with experts who do this every day. But if your skilled you surely save a ton of fees.

Also wealth management is more focused on wealth preservation than generating high returns, that is more the focus of asset management (e.g. hedge funds, private equity etc.).

This is a bit simplistic. It’s more focused on setting a target return and cash flows consistent with your current life plans. Whether this is a defensive or more aggressive position is really up to you and your goals. But Wealth managers are about putting an investment strategy in place to achieve that. They also help actively manage your portfolio to address macroeconomic trends.

>"Real" wealth management has a lot more legal work behind it

This is just me, but if I had legal work and deep pockets, I'd hire a lawyer.

>a majority of people think that when it comes to finance they can compete on an equal level with experts who do this every day

>But if your skilled you surely save a ton of fees.

If you are "focused on wealth preservation" rather than "generating high returns", what is the need for skill?

If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me? Are the wealth management divisions of every podunk bank and credit union there for a reason? Would I need to hire "protection"?

Warren Buffett famously said he "upon his passing, has directed the trustee for his wife’s benefit to “put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund.”

And Barack Obama reportedly put all his assets in government bonds when he became President to avoid conflicts of interest.

Obviously not everyone takes this sort of simple approach, but some famous examples seem to prove it's possible.

I agree. Most private money managers are not worth the cost: 75bps per year (or more) on managers balance. I recommend: Half your age in percent (30yrs old -> 15%) invested in 2yr US Treasury notes, plus remaining in low cost S&P 500 ETF. You will beat 99% of "wealth managers" after a decade, and 99.9% after two decades.

Do you have any data to support this?

Vanguard returns, or Warren Buffet's ETF bet against hedge managers come to mind.

> If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me?

Not from you, but the IRS will take 40% of everything when you die.* Only 60%, at best, goes to your heirs depending on state law. Unless you proactively plan.

* Yes, yes the $13M federal exemption but that's a rounding error at the $500M+returns scale.

Aw, the poor little workshy brats. If there's three of them they'll have to struggle by on $100 million each. By the safe withdrawal rule, that's just $4 million a year each indefinitely.

Cry me a river.

Good. Should be more like 80%.

No more aristocracies.

> If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me? Are the wealth management divisions of every podunk bank and credit union there for a reason? Would I need to hire "protection"?

The market might take it away from you. Last year the S&P returned -20% - there goes $100M!

By this dumb reasoning of unrealised losses, you should never invest in any security (bond or stock) else the exact same scenario may happy. You are destined for the poor house without taking equity index risk in this generation.

I was explaining why capital preservation is important with this (albeit) dumb example. Obviously someone with $500M is going to be a bit more sophisticated about it (there are reasons hedge funds that return 15-20% annualized charge 2 & 20 - or some now do 3 and 30 with a 5yr lockup).

>hedge funds that return 15-20%

This is always a scam. Madoff died in prison, you know.

I would say ledger is more about knowing where your money is going, and ghostfolio is about making sure you minimize the risk of losing said money all at once after you hit a certain wealth threshold

Can ledger track performance over time (which I assume Ghostfolio can). Does ledger (or the eco-system around) come with integration towards sources which categorize assets, and can it easily give a breakdown of the exposure according to such categorizations (per industry, per region, etc.)?

I don't know about ledger, but gnucash can track performance over time[1, 2]. I don't think Gnucash can do your second ask on its own.

[1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//chapter_inv...

[2] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//rpt_standar...

Yes, no.

Yes, Ledger can do all those things. No, it doesn't do this "out of the box".

I do most of these things. Simple, by adding meta-tags to my ledger. I'm just now working on consolidating on all my willy-nilly scripts and tools. And then plan to turn this into an actual "investment dashboard" ala ghostfolio but using the ledger as source.

In the end, a plain-text-ledger is just a of database. And the ledger query language (e.g. bean-query-language) a way to query it and produce reports.

So, what you are asking is more like "can SQLite categorize assets, give a breakdown of the exposure according to such cats per industry, region etc". Well, sure it can. But it's a bit of a strange question.

Of course it's possible to implement these features on top of any system which stores the transactions... but I'm sure you agree that to a user it matters that these things are accessible without writing lots of willy-nilly scripts, and preferable not having to add such meta-tags manually when other sources have already categorized them.

Thus I suspect there's space for more specialized solutions like Ghostfolio. Although I myself would prefer if my accounting system could also do these things. (I'd be interested in these willy-nilly scripts. I also enjoy writing willy-nilly scripts, but time is limited)

EDIT: saw the link you already posted

I entirely agree. And this is why I'm building use-focused, case-specific tools around ledger/beancount.

I mean, "It's possible to do this via x amount of work" vs "Here, you can use this OSS/selfhosted version which will do it for you." Do you legitimately not see the appeal of the latter to many people?

I never said that I did not see the appeal. I'm not sure where you got that from.

Au contraire: I'm building my business around that exact problem: that ledger is potentially good at doing anything, but doesn't do it out of the box.

If you're using a tool like ledger, I don't think there's much ghostfolio could say to convert you. Seems like comparing apples to oranges. I'm not familiar with ledger, but at a glance, seems like it's made for a different audience with different needs.

In fact, I'm working on something alike Ghostfolio but that uses ledger as database. It's very much early stage and mostly proof of concept and hacked together scripts. But I'm moving it to both "tabula" and "bullboard":

https://github.com/berkes/bullboard-rs https://github.com/berkes/tabula

Again: early. But tabula is my consolidation of random "beancount/ledger" stuff regarding running my small business and startup. And bullboard my consolidation of random "beancount/ledger" stuff regarding everything investment related. The latter is just a CLI tool for now, and barely works. But once the businesslogic is done, I plan to add a web-interface alike ghostfolio to it. A tad simpler, I think, though.

That's interesting. So, if I understand this thread at all, your projects may help me to "preserve" my "wealth", with ledger?

It won't "preserve" it: if you sell or buy at the wrong time and place, it won't prevent you. It's basically a way to visualize your portfolio: hows it doing, what are your allocations, how well are you keeping your strategy? do you need to rebalance?

Basically "bullboard" will be "yet another portfolio tracker/manager". Like so many out there (Ghostfolio, PortfolioDividendTracker etc), nothing new.

The only difference is that the source is your (existing) ledger/beancount file.

To be clear: it currently is a CLI application, but the goal is for it to be a web tool. Also selfhostable.

https://github.com/redstreet/fava_investor already exists in this space and is very similar: it's what I currently use. I don't like it, though. I dislike python for bookkeeping software and complex domain modelling. I dislike the UX of fava. And I prefer opinionated, focused software: call a spade a spade. Not "Assets", "Income" or "Transactions" but Stocks, ETFs, Bonds, Dividend, Sells, Buys etc.

Had trouble hitting back on the browser. Major peave.

Is this able to plot different Roth + 401k strategies to maximize tax advantages and returns? Also figuring in your small business activity and write-offs? Big picture.

I've been watching YouTube videos explaining various strategies and ways to bank yourself. Totally pissed me off that no one told me all of this before. My lack of knowledge has really hosed my finances bad and I was the person that would help coworkers figure all this stuff out. I found a lot of people just leaving their money in money market funds in their matched 401 and they were very apprehensive about doing anything. Even saw a trained broker do this.

People are leaving a lot of wealth on the table because they don't know the laws and how they can get rich moving their money around and they will not go to advisors for various reasons,again, mostly out of ignorance. I hear advisors often don't know these laws or fail to tell people.

I had no idea you could get a solo 401k and completely self-direct the investments (I.e put the money into your business or a friends). Searched Fidelity and was able to dig up the PDF forms.

I always thought it was evil to borrow from your 401k,and indeed every document you find on this throws up scary words and harsh language and intermixes the topic with withdrawals. Powerful source of funds that people avoid out of fear and ignorance.

I'm not concerned with watching balances but would like something that can present scenarios for various vehicles and suggest different courses of action.

I want to start a small business, what is the best way for me to fund that without risking to much or getting hosed on taxes...

Two things I’ve learned after 15 years of working starting during the GFC:

- It’s counterintuitive, but during your saving years you’re better off if the market’s doing poorly because everything’s on sale. If you’re retired you want the opposite.

- Frequently looking at your net worth is a big distraction. Just focus on the things you can control, like your savings rate and expenses.

I am using Portfolio Performance for a while now. Need to check how it compares.

PP is easier to set up though, it's a plain old Java desktop application.

https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/

Edit: it works well for crypto too, you can track anything that has a count and a price.

I use that too. Ghostfolio looks a lot more beautiful but probably is more limited in terms of features :)

I found Portfolio Performance to be non-intuitive and very hard to use

That's true. UX is not the best. But it has a lot of features and works reasonably well once you got used to it.

Looks nice. The comparison with S&P500/similar Index funds is an important metric to track. I’d also built a tool https://monkeybeat.market/ which demonstrates a similar concept.

I’ve been exploring such projects off late myself. I found https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa to be a really clean and well implemented project on similar lines. It already handles a bunch of asset classes familiar to the country I’m residing in which is tempting me to give it a shot sometime soon!

I like focusing on DIY-ers and having the web UI for visualizations. Makes sense that someone who would take the time to set things up would want increased flexibility over a spreadsheet.

Call me old fashioned but I just add everything under 'other accounts' on vanguard, and call it a day. It's close enough for my taste. I imagine other brokerages offer this feature too and vanguard has pretty much the worst reputation for ux out there.

Yeah, Schwab can track other accounts from Fidelity, Vanguard, etc.

I’m probably a minority but I don’t micromanage my wealth. General account level information is good enough. I also do not trust wealth managers, usually their advice is terrible. Schwab automatically assigns a person on your account after a certain wealth threshold. They call me occasionally to make sure I’m aware of the risks which of course I am.

Their advice isn't necessarily terrible, it's just strongly biased towards them making a buck off you.

It used to be standard for advisors to make money on commission, which led to terrible incentives (read: they are paid to get you into particular investments, which is an incentive to recommend things that make them money even if they are bad for you). This practice is declining, but you still find it at the big banks and brokers. "Fee only" advisors means they only take a fee from you, so they don't have this conflict of interest -- you can find many at Napfa.org .

Even then, though, advisors are biased to recommend things that they can actually do for you, so sometimes they will recommend things that are easier for them ("just use the same portfolio as my other clients") instead of finding what's truly optimal for you.

And that's actually usually okay. The kind of person who never touches their investments and doesn't understand finance is actually better off with an advisor than doing literally nothing -- e.g. sitting in cash, or really dumb investments your aunt recommended -- which is the practically the counterfactual a lot of the time

>e.g. sitting in cash

I read somewhere (but didn't do my own research) Schwab's business model these days, maybe others, is making money off idle customer cash, now that they don't charge trading commissions. They may not want customers to buy anything.

With interest rates up so much, I would guess it is even more lucrative?

With VMRXX giving a YTD compound yield of 5.41% ( https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun... ), I've actually been happy to have parked a bunch of cash and not touched it.

It isn't going to compound though, at least that's what long term rates imply.

Why did the site hijack the back button? I tried to return to HN but it just kept reloading into the ghostfol.io site...

I am always baffled by people who actually use the back and forward buttons. I guess I just assume that everyone opens links by right-clicking and opening in a new tab. Is there some reason why back and forward is a better or even useful option?

Mobile devices, for one.

The amount of websites that don’t support control+click indicate to me that most people don’t use the method.

Edit: but regardless it’s not okay to hijack the back button.

You cannot possibly be serious. Who uses back buttons, on the web? Everybody.

I hit the same problem as gp, on mobile, tho I did open in a new tab (hold+open in new tab). The back button is usually a quick swipe from right to get me back to what I was reading.

Cmd+click! Right clicking to open a link in a new tab is uncivilized.

I'm flattered to see they have a page advertising it as an alternative to ProjectionLab (disclosure: I made that).

Though I haven't yet seen a part of this tool that makes projections. Did I miss that?

I never understand how these kinds of software do data importing. Do you have to manually import these things every time I do a trade or I get my paycheck or spend $2 at the corner shop? If so that seems annoying

I just use a spreadsheet in Libre Calc that scrapes prices of securities (almost) live from public sources using an extension.

All I need to do is keep track of whatever I transfer to my broker and number of securities purchased for each type of security.

Works well enough for an investor. Does not work well enough for a gambler (day trader) :p

I use Firefly III (which isn't quite the same but similar issue) and import csv exports from my bank and other accounts. I have to jump through some hoops with Selenium to automate downloading the csv files but it works mostly reliably after some fiddling.

There's bank data aggregators like Yodlee. If the app uses that it can auto import transactions. Ghostfolio seems to be oriented around manual import though (export csv from your bank and import yourself periodically).

Does it handle stock splits, consolidations, dividends etc? Calculating returns (basically tracking growth) is a non-trivial problem.

Yes, somewhat. Not as proper as it should. But it does the job. Esp with such events as splits, mergers, renames you can see it's not a very professional setup. I've had to hack around it by adding and then nulling some assets like "emission claims". Or, in my country, dividend-tax is extracted immediately so I now hack around that by adding that tax as "fee" to ghostfolio. It works. But isn't a replacement for actual book- and portfolio-keeping.

How did you handle stock splits?

A manual action where I multiply and divide all actions. It works, bit hardly. Won't do it again. A next time, I'll probably try to do a sell all old stocks for X/stock, and then buy all for X/splitamt/stock to handle this.

https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/discussions/1072

I think there's a python package for Ghostfolio, I assume we can automate this process

Ghostfolio is awesome! Sorry for the plug, we are doing something similar with markets.sh

it's not open-source (yet) but we're giving you all the data of connected portfolios and bank accounts via api and it's free if you just want the data. Also we are investing a lot of time in asset matching and market data (even options are supported), something all the other tools we've tried fell short of (especially global stocks and multi currency accounts).

I much much prefer markets.sh' UI to Ghostfolio's, honestly. I'd even call it particularly good. Looks like Tailwind, right?

When you say "(yet)", are you referring just to the API code or everything? Because I'd love to use this if I could host it myself.

Thank you so much! Yeah, right now we keep the API as open as possible, we’re big fans of oss but it’s gonna take a while as the system runs on many databases and systems. Apart from the simple portfolio tracking, we are ingesting live data from global stocks, thousands of news per day and do clustering and machine learning and all kinds of fancy things on it.

I’d love to open source the dashboard first as it is probably useful to self-host and just feed with your own data. Let me know if you have any questions.

Neat idea, but I don't see a great way to handle real estate, unless it's shoe-horned awkwardly into wealth items. For me, that's a gotta-have.

Repo: https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6ObSQVJZk

Typescript tells me that it will start to break soon if it ever gets abandoned.

JavaScript packages are one of the fastest routing rotting set of dependencies.

I wanted to dispute this but then I remembered that I wasted 2 hours yesterday because Yarn 3 PnP and Typescript weren't playing nice together.

I feel that pain, I've gone through that but I've just switched to Yarn 1 and call it a day

Yeah... I kept it on Yarn 3/berry but set the node-linker back to node_modules and moved on with my life.

Not really a trailer. More like a marketing placeholder video with moving screenshots.

> trailer

I'll wait for the teaser

Maybe I'm just getting old but it always makes me skeptical when something is introduced as "Open Source" and then the main landing page includes a pricing tab.

What's wrong with paying for the software? You get the source code, they provide you the service if you don't want to handle it by your self.

I think GP means seeing a pricing section without any extra details suggests the open-source version is limited in some way, with certain features paywalled. That's how I see it.

People are cheapskates when it comes to OSS. OP put in thousands of commits and only has 18 supporters. They are not exactly a software baron are they?

On the other hand you have some onlyfans girls flashing their ass for 10 seconds getting thousands or even millions.

I was initially too, but upon reading said Pricing page was pleasantly surprised.

Is there a lot of free cloud hosted open source software as a service that isnt ad supported?

What is the market data source (is there one?)

How does this compare to Beancount + Fava?

I very much wondered the same thing. I've had a couple of occasions where I really wanted a numerical answer to some finance questions, like for instance keeping an IRA vs paying taxes and converting to Roth. And I want it to take into account my tax burden, how much cash I have available, etc. The simplest way for me to do it was python scripts and Beancount + Fava. I don't even try and use it for keeping track of my finances, I use quicken for the simple reason that I know my spouse can use it as well. I didn't see "tax planning" on the features for Ghostfolio, this seems so very basic to me that I couldn't consider using it. I understand why in a way, there are so many situations. Of course if I only have to model my particular situation it's much simpler to just write a simple model in python.

"saying no to spreadsheets in 2023"

I just don't get this sentiment. Nothing lets me model free-form questions as quickly, easily and effectively as opening up Excel. I get there are better tools for specialized or defined problems, but the spreadsheet is still my go-to general purpose tool.

The first 6 years of my career was working on data heavy applications. The statisticians on staff all used Excel to prototype their models. It's a great tool

Agreed. I have a degree in statistics, years of experience working with data analysis, closer 15 years working with python, know R etc. etc. But if I just want to quickly play around with some numbers to get a quick feel for a problem I almost always still fire up Excel first.

Petulant NIH syndrome.

Site not loading for me

It accurately reflects my wealth management needs

404 wealth not found?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230823004121/https://ghostfol....

Seems to load very slowly. Maybe not serving statically from a CDN

Same

Does anyone have experience with self-hosting this? Curious to learn what worked and what did not.

I tried it a couple months ago and wasn't too impressed. Unless I missed the feature, I trade enough to need something that can plug in to my brokerage accounts. There is a trade import feature, but I'm not going to export/import transactions from multiple accounts daily.

Have you found a better alternative for someone who trades a lot? I'd like to drill down into trade results per symbol and get ROI statistics and visualize past buy/sell points.

I just tried and it came up fine. Onboarding is non-existent so that's unfortunate.

Edit: took me a while to find it, but the last similar too I tried was https://projectionlab.com/, and while paid, it's UX is way better.

Does this retrieve data from your accounts? If so, what does it use to do that? Plaid?

I love projects like these exists, but not being able to download the data automatically from my accounts was a dealbreaker for projects like GNUCash.

And have You managed do somehow automatize it in the end?

Thanks for posting - looks like something I've wanted to find for a while

lol,

Is it "a thing" that you post your stuff in Reddit, Dev.to, and a random "Awesome" repo on GitHub and then use that as "social proof"?

"Seems legit." - Some guy on Yelp

Very nice! Awesome tech stack too; a welcome change from all the React/Next.js projects these days.

Hug of death? Unable to load the site.

Fantastic! Now all what I need is to have wealth to manage

LICENSE

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/blob/main/LICENSE

For anyone who needs a hosted/paid/slick alternative, there is https://kubera.com

Disclosure - I work at Kubera.

Ghostfol.io have a hosted/paid option for 19 USD/year. Is Kubera worth the extra $100+?

Please take the 14-day and find out for yourself.

How successful has the [COMPETITOR] vs Kubera pages in footer technique been for y'all?

What tool did you use to crete the promo video?

Cool! an open source Angular app!

The GitHub link is: https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio

The premium hosted edition of this service isn't inspiring confidence if their front page, presumably residing within the same cloud infrastructure, can't handle the HN hug of death.

Operational issues aside, I love seeing open source self-hosted breaking into retail wealth management. Right now, it seems everybody I speak to that isn't a professional or institutional investor defaults to a frankenstien combination of spreadsheets and/or web frontends exposed by banks and 'standard' wealth management sites like Wealthfront/Bettermint.

Curious to hear what you're looking for from a wealth management product.

With banking / brokerage platforms like Alpaca, it's possible to create an open source roboadvisor, but I'm not sure who the market would be. Someone who is interested in algorithmic trading would go directly access the API's, and someone who wants a hands off experience could choose from existing products, or get bundled services from a big bank.

I'm squarely in the frankenstein of spreadsheets, but also made a mobile frontend in https://jch.app The people I've talked to who use spreadsheets do it because it's fun.

Yes I've done a lot of customer discovery interviews in this space, and what resonates is a quote: "People like spending their money, not spending time with it."

Outside of people who money manage for a living, most analysis tools seem to fit into a "low frequency, low pain" problem for individuals in the "retail" segment. UHNW have so many assets they need tailored help. And people with huge pain in debt don't have much time, or lack the wherewithal to manage spreadsheets or analysis apps.

Ya the people I talked to that enjoyed tinkering were FIRE enthusiasts or bogleheads. But that felt more like entertainment and community rather than looking for a solution to a specific problem.

I talked with small financial advisory firms (1-3 advisors) to see if there were some backend tools to help them with client work. There's some initial data gathering and entry, but the value is the coaching and psychology rather than the hard numbers.

Yes I think that is very true about advisory. In the retail space a lot of the value prop for an advisor seems similar to a personal trainer -- someone to keep you accountable. At the "more money, more problems" level, advisors actually do become busy executing specific tasks -- monitoring and trading multiple accounts, negotiation among family members, real estate agents, or PE firms... -- tech is empowering advisors to do more rather than replacing them.

I like Arta's pitch as a "digital family office" that handles more than just investments. Managing investments is still table stakes, but they also throw in estate planning and other offerings that a traditional financial advisor would offer.

I tried Titan a while back and found that less compelling as a "hedge fund / active management roboadvisor". It didn't seem to differentiate sufficiently from the passive roboadvisors or what traditional wealth management could offer.

One thing that I would like to see is tax impact analysis though this is naturally very country-specific.

For example I would like to calculate the impact of wash sale or seeing the tax impact for selling from certain lot (in terms of short/long term taxes). And if you did these what would your tax impact look like if you sold things at expected mark growth rate (or certain value you set).

It's a tool which 100% benefits from having a good UX, so not having a single screenshot on the frontpage is not a good sign. I don't count the linked YouTube video as one as it redirects me to YouTube.

> saying no to spreadsheets in 2023

Normalize spreadsheets as evergreen technology. Say no to weeb3 in 2023.

Can someone not just make a wealth management spreadsheet in Excel? If anyone has a good one, can you share or sell to me?

Is this the sort of thing you are after?

https://cspersonalfinance.io

This is so good. I've tried so many homebaked spreadsheet trackers and semi-complete side project sites. This one looks like it strikes a good balance between feature completeness and simplicity

Isn't "wealth" a misnomer.

Do people with real wealth really use open source tools?

Or do they have meetings with their accountants, bankers, brokers.

This is really "wanna be wealthy" tools.

Wealth is an industry term. It doesn't imply that one should be wealthy (rich) to use this tool. Wealth management is a tool for planning your own personal wealth for the future.

For example, you add all your accounts/investments and have the software calculate how much you need to save so that by age 65 (retirement) you have $X which you will need so that by the time you reach life expectancy (say 90 y/o) you have > 0$ left.

There is other stuff you can add in, like "I would like Y$ saved by 20XX so that I can purchase a house. How will that affect the amount I need to save now and how much will that affect my savings at retirement."

> Or do they have meetings with their accountants, bankers, brokers.

It is probably a good idea to have a financial advisor do this for you since they have the know-how (and certification depending where you live) and will know about regional benefits you can apply which can increase your "wealth". However, if you want to do this yourself because you know the space then there is software like this, or Wealth Simple for example.

K. You're right, you can classify the term "Wealth" as any free capital.

So if I have an extra $5 I can manage that "Wealth".

Most of the wealthiest people in the world actually manage their own wealth as their primary occupation (which can take many facets). There are places to hire professionals to assist, but until you are in the tens of millions or more in net worth it's usually a better deal to self-manage because professionals expect a percentage of assets under management as a fee. Once you have a high enough net worth you operate a family office / self-organized finance company and hire people directly.

You don't get wealthy by giving someone else 1% of AUM for performing on-par with a passive investment in index funds you could self-manage. So, sure, this is "wanna be wealthy", but what even is "wealthy"? I have a plan using spreadsheets and other tools that is on track to take me into low-mid double digit millions prior to retirement, I can't imagine giving someone 1%, which can be six-figures or more, every year for clicking some buttons. At some point managing my own wealth is worth more investment of my time than any other occupation.

> You don't get wealthy by giving someone else 1% of AUM for performing on-par with a passive investment in index funds you could self-manage.

This is how advisors are typically paid, but this isn't all that they do. Empirically, as people make more money, they turn more to advisors and away from self-directed or robo apps.

Lots of people have opined on why, if you follow the trade publications for advisors. To me, the reasoning comes down to risk: if you have a lot at stake then you will pay money for a lawyer to review for $$$$ per hour. If you have a lot of money you will pay 1% if you can feel more comfortable that the advisor is handling all the aspects of it and you can sleep better at night.

What do you define as wealthy? If you read bogleheads / fire blogs, there are plenty of people I would define as wealthy that self manage their assets. A lot of them use spreadsheets, some use free / cheap software online.

Everyone in my family with a net worth over 5MM self-manages their assets. Many financial advisors/managers are percentage based commission which ends up being about as close to a scam as you can get without it being unethical. (very much just my own opinion here)

I don't trust industries that use ignorance to line their pockets, which is why I manage my own wealth.

Worked in wealth management (and am now building something similar to the OP but from a totally different direction), it is a complete scam.

The original comment says that no-one is using apps...what do you think wealth managers use? Wealth managers are usually the same products that are re-skinned for professional use with a few added features that most advisors should know how to do themselves...but usually don't (I worked for someone managing nine figures who didn't understand that you could use Excel to do calculations, so he would sit there with a calculator and hardcode every number...this man is worth $10m+ himself).

If you have the ability, I appreciate that some people have neither the time or inclination, do it yourself. At medium levels of wealth (more than $1m and under $50m), you are likely unable to access good advice so this is really the sweet spot for doing it yourself (if you prefer simple financial products, financial advice largely exists as a service in this bracket because people choose to invest in extremely complex products that are designed to give financial advisors something to charge money for...if you have a DC pension and are investing in ETFs, 99% of financial advisors cannot do anything for you).

> At medium levels of wealth (more than $1m and under $50m), you are likely unable to access good advice

What the actual f...

According to the "Global Wealth Databook 2021" by Credit Suisse, page 129, there are in the US:

- $1-5M : 19.5M people (<6%)

- $5-10M : 3.2M people (<1%)

- $10-50M : 1.5M people (0.4%)

And that is from one of the richest country in the world, with a very steep exponential wealth distribution.

$1-50M is _far_ from "medium wealth" by any stretch of the imagination.

>$1M (liquid) is enough to be denoted "high net worth" HNW and access private banking, with a dedicated wealth manager, from most major investment banks.

It isn't. Maybe Morgan Stanley do $1m liquid, but they are aimed at the general public. The big investment banks usually start somewhere around $5-10m, and to actually get good advice you need to be somewhere above this level.

>$1-50M is _far_ from "medium wealth" by any stretch of the imagination.

There are 2 ways to interpret "at medium levels of wealth":

* A medium amount of money among the general population. This is the interpetation you're thinking of.

* A medium amount of money among wealthy people. So wealthy might mean $500k+, with the low end of wealthy meaning $500k-1M, and medium level of wealthy meaning $1M-5M. Below wealthy would be middle class. This may be the interpretation skippyboxedhero was thinking of.

So, then, who are the right people for the kind of financial questions that require experience but don't need an ongoing relationship? (For example, someone who has an existing IRA but would like to convert it as to later take advantage of backdoor Roth conversions - it's a complex modeling exercise that's probably simple for an expert but hard to get right for someone who will need to do it precisely once in their life.

That is the problem. Everyone wants single-time advice but it isn't possible to actually distribute that product profitably in the current structure of the market.

Regulatory costs are very high, this means insurance costs are high, etc. Marketing costs are extremely high in financial services too. If you are going mass market, you are paying hundreds of dollars for leads...how do you make that work if you can't charge much and need to acquire your whole customer base every week?

This is why most of the market is underserved, why rich people end up owning all the high-yield assets, and why the only real solution is having very large institutional pools of capital for most retail savings (i.e. like Australia's superannuation funds, which produced a level of wealth for the average consumer vastly in excess of the US with lower levels of GDP per capita, relatively poor penetration of financial markets, etc.).

For me personally, half the benefit of handling your finances correctly is that with the knowledge of one thing often comes learning about something else that might tweak your financial strategy or at the very least increase your options in life. For something like a backdoor roth strategy or when it might make sense to utilize isn't something I personally would want handled for me. I would want to understand the decisions I make and potentially learn something important along the way.

Financial literacy doesn't seem optional for the wealthy from my perspective. There's too much to gain by having it and too much to lose by neglecting it.

You probably have a house, a car, a 401k, expensive phone, computer(s). At least a good portion of the HN demographic probably fits this description.

So you're more wealthy then the person working 2 jobs, living with 3 roommates, commuting by public transit.

Wealth is just your possessions with value.

This is just being "pedantic about social class".

Technically you are correct.

The term "Wealth" is just a word for money.

Pedantically, any money can be termed "Wealth".

So if I have an extra $5 dollars, I can manage that "Wealth", and I should not get hung up on a term that the ignorant masses associate with a "Social Class".

There are no social hierarchies, we are all wealthy on a sliding scale, from 5$ to $5MIL to $50BIL.

money is a particular type of wealth that is used as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a short-term store of value. qualities that make something money-like include divisibility, fungibility, portability, liquidity, easy transferability, wide social acceptance.

wealth can take many forms including human capital, social capital, future earning power, you can be wealthy in some way and yet cash-poor

- one of the apparently ignorant masses

Do I have to list every asset type and their relationships, to make a point about a word?

I don't think it is surprising that the word "wealth" is used by a lot of people in different ways.

I was accused of using the word incorrectly as in "Wealth" means only "Rich" people. I was wrong because a lot of "non-Rich" can also manage their "Wealth". Someone in the comments even considered having 5Mil of assets to be NOT Rich, NOT wealthy.

It seemed like in the comments there was push back that just because they are managing their "Wealth" that they are NOT Wealthy, and so don't lump them into that category.

Instead of "Wealth" meaning, long list of asset types.

I think maybe that is the point. If you have enough 'assets' and free time to ponder the concept of "wealth" as units of exchange and the nature of money and future earning power, then you are probably "Rich" to many people.

So if you are needing a software tool to manage your "Wealth" then you probably have more "Money/Assets/Fungible Stuff" than most, like >5% of worlds population, so you could be considered "Rich". Then because you are "Rich", "Wealthy", "Have lot of Money", yes, you can be grouped with "Rich" and people can have opinions on the group of "Rich" people.

So I think it is ok to assume if someone needs tools to manage their "Wealth", that I can assume they are "Wealthy".

Would argue a surprising number of millionaires+ don't have any bankers/brokers, as the fees are usually % based and they really add up.

There are quite some wealthy people who happens to understand technology well and use and contribute to many open source tools.

nah. Most of wealthy people I've interacted with have refined/specialized workflows that are something similar to 5 excel spreadsheets.

Build a tool that allows people to organize their 5 spreadsheet and you win.

I've tried a number of tools that promise to "automatically" pull all of my transactions and assets in and create a dashboard for me, but I always end up back with a group of spreadsheets. My current setup is:

1. Overview spreadsheet that shows my current net worth (fed from my other spreadsheets), a monthly snapshot of spending, income, and assets, and number of months until FIRE based on my trailing 12 month spend and income.

2. Spreadsheet tracking stocks I own + their current value

3. Spreadsheet tracking my crypto transactions (that I run a script against to get the cost basis and current value to plug into spreasheet 1)

4. Lunchmoney.app - website that I use to track and categorize spend. This data fees into my overview spreadsheet.

Sounds like you'd like Tiller. It's what I use. Pulls all your transactions and balances into speadsheets and then you can use their templates or your own from there. I have wealth dashboard, spending, etc...

Can you share your spreadsheet templates or talk about how one would go about creating something useful?

That's cool. I'll try out Lunchmoney.app!

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