What Apps Do You Use? (Part 2)

Welcome to real financial planning broadcast on w K X L and available

wherever you get your podcast I'm Matt Robson joined as always by Mike Morton

of Morton financial advice and host of financial planning for entrepreneurs

A fantastic podcast The Mike Morton

podcast Mike

welcome back

Thanks Matt It's good to be here.

I like that You still have

a

flag

up behind You there

Well I'm

feeling extremely patriotic now an old

ways

Um you know it's

but where's where did you put the kids' artwork?

Where did that go Don't tell me you put it it in the in the

You know there's there's a story

to be had in this And I'm gonna go ahead and tell it real quick I have the same

problem that a lot of parents have, which is you have treasured children's

artwork What do you do with it after a certain amount time And I was introduced

to an app I won't even say the name of it cause I don't want to sued for

libel but you people are like, oh, use this app It's great You just take a

photo and it'll store it like a filing system you a digital version then you

can throw out your doodle Well, I was obsessive and I read the fine print and

it turns out that they get intellectual property rights to whatever you

holy

submit with them which

is

weird because it means like, well what if your children's

artwork includes like selfies?

Or like, I don't know really good Or it includes photos Like they own all that

up I'm not worried it's gonna end up on a mug but it's like you no longer Own

this stuff, and it can be used anywhere throughout the universe commercial

purposes or who knows what other purposes including you know they have

rights to personal

information about The whole thing is weird So anyway

How long.

So

speaking of AB which we're talking about today, but I'm curious,

how long was the legalese

document that you read through

it it was long but I what I did

is

I scanned

down to personal information which was like section four So you know, like I to

the good stuff It wasn't like a situation where the You sign the iTunes user

agreement You know they did south park about that where it turns out that you've

agreed to attach yourself to other human beings become a human sent iPad Um that's

that's not what was going on with this but still, it's just a good reminder as we get

it into discussion about apps and tools to use Read the fine print And I I should

say, so look, we are answering this is part two of answering a listener question

about Hey Mike what apps and tools and planning devices and programs do you use,

or do you recommend, or do your clients use to make financial planning and you

know all of our financial management in our lives a little bit it easier this is

actually a great thing to say, which is Just because we mentioned something you

shouldn't skip reading the fine print yourself We're not suggesting that any

of these things do cause to sign away the to your kids' artwork or you know to have

yourself attached to other human beings become a human centipede But you should

always read the print on this stuff right So listener question It's a great listener

question about what you use We we've covered what you use for budgeting Let's

talk about investments What do you use

for

investments

Yeah so on the investments and this is a good one that you want to

track over time Now some people get very obsessive of tracking their investments

you know they might check say Daily or hourly where my investment's doing.

And then other people, maybe check every five or 10 years.

I just booked the money away in my 401k I must have made some choices about where

it's going so I've had clients at both ends of those spectrums where it's like,

oh, I think I've got stuff in 401ks.

I

don't know I haven't checked in quite a few few years

and then I

that in the in our next

episode we are gonna talk about that exact

theme

That's right And then I have people you know who who want to talk

stock market and stocks and movements and all that kind of stuff but it is

important to track over time And today we're talking about the apps I love

tracking your net worth over time.

I like doing that once a year I do that in simple spreadsheet So that's

really easy Just kind of like write down everything you own and everything you owe

I'm not gonna get into net worth today.

We'll talk about but stick on the investment So the reason

you want to track it is just.

you'd like it to go go over time.

so that's good.

And you also wanna see how you're adding to it and I like to also

look at the diversification That's the biggest reason that I'm tracking

for myself my own investments.

So what what do I use I I actually use a spreadsheet All right For tracking my

own investments so I I love I use 'em all the time so it was pretty easy for

me to build build my own spreadsheet I have I want to say 4, 5, 6 different

accounts Between individual retirement accounts 401ks brokerage accounts

might be a couple more than that.

And I list all the holdings for each of them in one spreadsheet.

So each of those accounts five or six accounts might have five or six things

and but they don't change that much over time So once you build it like copy

and paste all the ticker symbols and everything and then it rolls up for me

I just built a custom spreadsheets to capture , how much I how many I have,

how many shares of different things and roll that up into total account values

in different asset classes We've talked talked about asset here so while you

have an ETF you know that's us large cap And so it's like oh that us large cap.

And I have $10,000 in that And that's you know some some percent of my

overall portfolio So then what I'm looking at in the spreadsheet is the

percent I have in each of those asset

Mm

And that's what is important to me.

And particularly if you wanna know exactly what I do it's a spreadsheet I check it at

least quarterly usually about quarterly, maybe once a month Um but quarterly I'll

go in and take a snapshot of because it's updating in real real time The spreadsheet

And so every quarter I go in and take a snapshot of exactly what values I have in

all those different accounts and all that stuff and save that so I can see quarter

to quarter, my progress and that's what

I

do for my own investments

Well that

resonates for me because I do something kind of similar myself although with

a slightly different use which is I concerned And again I I was I was kind

of being tongue and cheek kind not when I said we are gonna talk about the topic

of What if you have a lot of how many is too many That, that is a theme for

an upcoming show because I think for a lot of people nowadays people hold

average of last time I checked this it was jobs in your career Many jobs have

different kinds of benefits that go them them You might have a 401k you might.

have some kind of You might you focus You love your clientele or entrepreneurs they

might have stock options or incentives and so you might have stock that vests

at a certain point so you might have far lung accounts the major one of The

major uses of keeping some kind of a tracker somewhere is so that if you get

hit by a bus your next of kin knows what you actually own and can benefit from

it Like I'm not saying I have a lot of money We do not Hey thieves out there

It's not worth it Believe me but I want my kids to get everything that we do have

And you my spouse may not be of it So anyway So spreadsheet is a good option.

What if people are just that's not their jam are there tools or

like bank tools that are kind of prefab that are

Yep Yeah, there's a couple there's a couple other options, but let me also

mention I love That you that use case but make sure cuz usually it is one partner

That's keep you know keeping track of more of the

Right for

polygamous

people There's a whole other

system that recommend We're gonna do an episode on that I'm joking

That's right

for my wife's sake

please

so definitely Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah that'll be the

Twitter feed for this episode

I promise this episode will blow up If tease

online that it's like have multiple Here's

how

you

do your financial planning

here's how you do do your financial

planning that's right Okay Anyway , So I do agree.

That's a great use case.

You want to to have everything written down right for the other person to

find but the other place for that really is gonna be in your estate planning

So make sure in your estate documents there should be like a cover page that

has your wishes, in English, know cuz the the estate planted documents are

usually a lot of legalese and then also just list your accounts right there You

know that's so Helpful And for anybody that's gone through a estate planning

or thinking about it just make sure to list everything because trust me if you

are are not around and someone's is your and picking up all the pieces having a

page or two just with some organizational

information

is gonna

make life way better

Yes So

right

so

so that's a good use case All right Other tools people that don't

wanna

spreadsheets come on we don't want to use spreadsheets

thanks for nothing

Thanks for nothing Yeah So one I've used in the past is called

personal personal capital and I haven't checked them out recently.

That was a while ago I know they've morphed a little bit but I think it's

still a pretty pretty good platform for combining investment accounts

from different Institutions So you got like a 401k over, fidelity and

you got brokerage over at Schwab and you got something at Vanguard Like

you want to consolidate all that.

That's kind kind the point of or one point I wanna mention around

tracking investments It's not really individual investments.

You can track that and follow that and do your your own thing.

But really I'm talking about in aggregate you your entire kind of

net worth portfolio You want to get a good insight into that because I

often find people are either over aggressive but usually they're.

Under aggressive usually there's cash kind of in four or five or six different

accounts You get your emergency fund of cash You've got you know some CA

you know some short term bonds or cash in your 401k and your brokerage.

And you're like geez 20 30% of my portfolio is actually just cash you know

and maybe maybe that's too high for you so that's why we wanna we wanna aggregate

personal will do that There's probably

some other ones but

that's the only one

that I'm

familiar with

that's you know it is an interesting point just to circle back to you were

saying about the prime use case here being by the way use case is like A sort of

more technical way of saying how do people use this It's what is it with programmers

and

engineers It's like you gotta you think you're

You think your doctors and lawyers, and you have to say

everything in Latin to make it

sound sophisticated Anyway

that's

since one of major ways that might use a tool to track your overall

investments is You wanna get a bird's eye view on what you've gotten Again I don't

want this to sound Allity we all have so much money It's just this applies to more

people than it seems like isn't just for rich folks the average person these days

is going to have multiple accounts You're going to have multiple financial because

you will have been in multiple jobs.

Now you may have had a lot of jobs that Don't have any type of investment or

retirement benefit fine, but, chances are, you've had at least more than one or

know you something you've set up yourself or, you know, you've got a house or you've

got multiple accounts to track And I think what is really hard is Trying to aggregate

If you are just using let's say you've got your retirement assets in fidelity

and they've got a nice interface you can get a lot of really good information

but it's being served to you first of all through their interface And their kind of

the way they categorize things And second of all, You're just seeing one slice of

the overall picture And so I it does make sense to that you would want some kind

of a central place to just get a sense or to be able to give to your financial

advisor what the whole picture looks like What's the diversification Right What's

the overall of risk set up that you've got And what is your overall net worth

Are you I mean for for us personally We were worthless people for a number

of years

You're Matt

Well thanks man

thanks man but from a but from a financial standpoint I assure you that

we many years for many Because our net liabilities net liabilities were higher

than our So you know anyway knowing that knowing that and knowing scale

out tip the scale out of that status seems like a to me seems like a valuable

enterprise

yeah.

And you know You want to look at everything because it is important just

again building building awareness and understanding and if you haven't done

it for a few years or you've never done it and you got a a partner and you

got a couple of jobs like who knows, you really don't have insight into

those past 401ks Are they aggressive Are they not Are they even invested?

I've met so many people that like oh yeah I put money into my individual

retirement account I think it's still in cash know this is like years later,

Or is it in

A managed fund

with

it's good to

Is it right Yeah

exactly We talked all about that, so that's really important So I will

mention, and then on , using your account fidelity or Schwab and using

that aggregator they'll tell you oh, are you on track for retirement There's lots

of good tools within there But again as Matt said it's only showing you that

slice And that might be if that's most of your net worth then that's great use

that tool Fantastic And that's one of the reasons you might look at consolidating

but if it's not, if it's 50% of your stuff cuz your 401k is somewhere else

then it's not really really that helpful.

It's, not really given in any kind of accurate data That's where

where these aggregators be good on the topic of consolidation.

I'm sure we'll get to this in our future episode on Do you have too many 401k

accounts or too many accounts there are are good reasons for aggregating,

accounts of of what I mean transferring oh, I've got an old old 401k Should I

transfer that to my IRA at fidelity?

Because fidelity has all my other accounts or should I transfer it to

Schwab Cuz that's where I do my banking there's good reasons to maybe do that

And this would be one of is so that You can get get most your stuff all

in one login so you can see and use the tools that that provider's given

You

You know I I

it funny You were mentioning, I was joking being worthless but it is an

interesting question because it does change your picture There are now I'm

gonna sound like a dork there are sub use cases to knowing exactly your overall

net worth is Maybe this is an episode we should do about about net worth you could

be in the position where you're going for a loan you're going for a mortgage

You wanna you need to have a and I on what is that Or the grim use case we

were talking about a moment ago, if you got hit by a bus are you what kind of

a financial position is your estate in?

So there's just so many reasons why being able to keep track of that makes a ton of

sense me And of course the political one I used work for a member of con Congress

who heard from economist there's this idea of value Add To goods right Like

you take a piece of lumber, you turn it into a piece of furniture it's called

value add And in Europe they actually tax it's called a that a value added tax Like

when you add value something and this economist was saying , through education

you can go through the same process with human capital And he turned that into in

political speeches to saying what were we need to do is add value people And it was

great pains we tried to tactfully explain to him what you've just said is that all

your constituents Are worthless and that what you to do is add value to them.

All right.

I'm way

off

And then text them That'd be great

right Tax That's what the government does but all right

Let's you mentioned cards a minute ago.

Let's cover credit quickly Any

tools you use

Yeah before we get, before we get credit cards, one thing I wanted to

mention that I I really like a tool is called M one finance And I ran across this

a couple years ago M one people can check it out, but what I like about it, it's

a kind of of like a brokerage, where you can put money there into retirement like

an individual retirement account or just a right brokerage account And what's cool.

about it neat is using technology to make your own robo advisor Is basically

it is So instead of like using wealth front or betterment and just their

models which you can pick, some of the different models and kind of tweak them

you can a a hundred percent make your own and say I I want to this $10,000 into

these five stocks at these percentages

and then, , do that just automatically click of a button so you can make your

own portfolios and the robot M one finance will update it when you add

more money or subtract money it'll automatically rebalance And this is

a pretty interesting one I I use it Here's a use case here's how I use M

to finance for kids money for the future So I I wanna provide my kids a

little bit of cushion or something.

Maybe they want a down payment for a house in 15 years So I'm adding

a few bucks a month into a portfolio That I've set up an M one finance and

every time few bucks roll in there, it automatically rebalances it buys

whatever is low and I've set up a portfolio That's a long term portfolio

for the far future So I was able to tweak, exactly which ETFs I wanted in there.

And then as I add money to it it automatically rebalances So that's

just just a good tool I found pretty interesting with technologies

you know Matt mean everything just moving lightning speed.

, so that's a a really good one that I thought was using robots

and computers

in a

really

one Okay That's cool all right Yeah Credit

cards

alright Yeah Credit cards

So credit cards we talked about it a little bit You only wanna make you

are paying off your credit card every month and so that's the the important

thing here, uh particular, what do I use?

I'm not a credit card hacking person.

I do not like trying to find the best deals and rotate my credit cards

and try to get ones to and track the points like drives me nuts so I

got a very simple through fidelity.

I use fidelity for some of of my accounts And so I got a simple like one

and a percent cash back That just goes straight into my fidelity account Super

easy no problem So that's what I use for my main one of my main credit cards

is fidelity and then my other credit card is through chase and I like their

interface a lot and they have some good credit cards That's actually my

business credit card they usually run some pretty good promotional points.

This one does cost money, so I don't necessarily recommend it but I think

when I got it it's got an annual fee the chase card I think think I have

the Sapphire chase Sapphire card It's like a hundred bucks a year.

So I I don't really recommend that you don't wanna be paying for

your credit card but this this one gave me sort of a thousand bucks

when I I signed up for it So I was like, eh, I I just kind of went it for that

one , getting the that rewards up front I am paying a fee now, so I want very

cognizant of that aware that I'm paying $100 a year for the privilege of using

that credit card So I have to make sure the points are whatever's gonna be good

ongoing or I I might make a switch but those two Those are the two in terms of

credit cards that I personally use So the apps I'm going into chase I'm going

into fidelity and monitoring that.

But really all I'm doing is making sure the auto pay is set and

making sure I have enough money in

my

checking account that when the auto auto

pay kicks

in

Right And you and that's I I think a lot of what was embedded in the listener

question is is the interface easy Does it make your planning easier to do And

it sounds like with of those it's yes.

As long you set up the auto pay

Is easy to do

Yeah.

That's the really thing Just making whatever set the autopay Now I did

wanna mention in , on financial planning because is what I do with clients of

course, is , we've talked about Budgeting investment, you know tracking investments,

tracking your budget, sure you're paying off your credit card looking at your

net worth Well we combine all of that and try to predict the future because

people want to know am I I doing the right things am I setting myself up for

success five years from now 10 years from now 30 years from now how should

I doing things And so We use financial planning planning software to predict

that future and say like well on the the road you're on with your income and

expenses and savings and investing Here's what what it might your value of of your

accounts At some point in the future And so so I use financial planning software

software There's a bunch of 'em out there.

I use one called right capital so people can look it up but these are.

Really geared towards financial advisors right So financial advisors would use

this platform to model the future with their clients And then the clients can

see the reports or have access I really like write capital because my clients

can log log in and , play with scenarios themselves What if I wanna retire Or

what if I spend a little bit less What if I wanna spend a little bit more

there's all all kinds of dials stuff It makes it very easy for them to go in but

I'm not aware in terms of that I think there are some tools out there but I

just don't know So maybe some listeners can tell us where you can do that kind

of thing on own financial planning software predicting income investments

expenses throughout time and see,

How likely

are

you to be able to retire

the the way you want

I've used

some of the

online myself Just to get a quick sketch of like if I were to save 10%

more given a bunch assumptions where would I be at I've actually found those

to be pretty useful for just ball parking Not that they're necessarily right they

just you can plug in A lot of the basic assumptions of like social security

What percent are gonna earn every year on investments how much income what

level of spending should expect in retirement And it's not so much that,

obviously math is math but it's not so much that each of those answers is

precisely right It's being able to compare different scenarios that I find useful

That's exactly

right and I wanna pause Matt, because that's exactly it's comparing the

different ideas of what you could do And in our minds we cannot pull all that

together our brain cannot process All those inputs and and calculations and

through time So by looking at the software and changing a toggle what if I want to

retire four years earlier How much less do I need to spend throughout retirement

now you have sort of an answer to that question in a ballpark you know know

in a range but like an answer that you can you can have fruitful conversations

now in comparing you know should we do

Right And it's also to me in terms of sensitivities again all kinds of

assumptions in this sensitivities know you have different things you could in

this but a little bit more you have you could do You could save a little bit go

for a higher paying job go for a higher Well you could figure out how sensitive

it mean in terms of your lifestyle , you could figure out how sensitive out well

actually, if you save a little bit more, you have the it turns out well actually

if you the job but you don't want and and it helps you to make decisions like that

A lot of that stuff is available you to make decisions like Hey we've got about

30 seconds You had one more can Google it Hey we've got about 30 seconds You

had one more point that I found really valuable in here which is everyone should

have password protection these days What

do you

Yeah, I think password Yeah I think password protection is critical These

days I use one, password the number one and then password is good pass is good.

There's other ones that are great it's critical going it's critical going back

to our estate planning and having partners and a Put I put put I put everything

into that password manager because again if something were to happen to me

then all of my account information and logins and everything are all place

For someone to

be

able

it seems

like

a small point It's really not nowadays All right Mike Morton Wow

We covered a lot of ground really not nowadays All right Mike Morton

Wow We covered a lot of ground here.

Great listener question Thanks so

Matt

us through it

Matt

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