← BiggerPockets Money Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
What if I told you one of the biggest obstacles to fire isn't your income or expenses, it's actually knowing where your money's going. Today I'm going to walk you through setting up a Monarch Money account live. We talk about it all the time on the podcast, but we love this tool. And if you're worried that it sounds too complicated, we're going to break it all down today. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me, as always, is my tracking where his money is going. Co host Scott Trench.
- [00:35]
B
Thanks, Mindy. Always great to be on top of the latest trends with you here at BiggerPockets Money. All right, you said it, Mindy. We really love this tool. This is what I use to personally track and manage my finances, track my net worth, track my spending and build the basic outline of a budget. Actually use another tool to adhere to my budget, which we'll talk about another time. But Monarch is the beating heart of how I track my personal finances. And I think it sounds annoying to have another thing to use potentially, but Monarch Money really is this command center for your finances takes a lot of guesswork out of the process for you. I will also say that we have been trying for years to get Monarch to sponsor BiggerPockets money. We are working towards a future where we have a handful of really close knit sponsors. And you guessed it, we finally have got a partnership with Monarch. They didn't ask for this episode. We're giving it to them as part of a broader campaign sponsoring the show. But we just love the product so much we thought we'd use it. We do have a discount for members that'll be following the entire video on the top right corner of your screen right there if you want to check it out. It's like 100 bucks a year for this, this tool. It's not a break the bank. And I, I, I believe it saves me many, many, many, many, many, many times that amount in terms of time and then accuracy and understanding my financial position.
- [01:51]
A
Scott, what are some of the things that you feel are really important to be tracking when someone's looking at their net worth?
- [01:57]
B
I think it's everything, right. And, and it's how do you have an understanding of where all your cash is? Do you have an understanding of what you, where your debts are, what liabilities you have? Are these updating reasonably frequently? Right. You can do this in a spreadsheet. All the stuff we're gonna do today and talk about can be done in a spreadsheet or done on a piece of paper, even. It's just the automation is so important at this point. There's so many transactions, little transactions that hit my credit cards or my bank account or changes in investments as money is added on a regular basis. Every day, the market moves, and the my portfolio ticks up or down. And just being able to look at those and just refresh things on an instantaneous basis is really important. It doesn't have to be every day. It doesn't have to be every month. It doesn't have to be every quarter. But at some cadence, you got to be checking these numbers. You cannot play the game of finance if you can't keep score. And while a spreadsheet's good, I think the new technology and there are several apps out there, like Empower, like personal capital, like Monarch Money, that can solve this problem. Monarch just happens to be our favorite.
- [02:55]
A
And, Scott, you said you didn't want to do this by hand every single day.
- [02:59]
B
Nope, I certainly do not want to do this by hand every single day. And I certainly like to kind of be able to check it.
- [03:04]
A
Yeah. And you said something I thought was interesting. Scott, you said, whether you check it every day, every quarter, every month, what do you think is a good cadence to check it? Because you get kind of obsessed. Not you specifically. You, like, formally get kind of obsessed. When you first start this and you're like, oh, I got to check it, like, every single day. When I first set up that Frankenomics portfolio with Frank Vasquez a couple of weeks ago, I was checking it multiple times a day, and I've stopped. I check it far less frequently now. But I'm wondering if when you're first starting checking your net worth, if it's detrimental to be checking every single minute, every single day, is it better to check once a week or once a month? What are your thoughts on that?
- [03:46]
B
I check it every day. I check it every day. I check my fitness every day. I'm either tracking calories or weighing myself or making sure I'm doing some kind of workout. I try to track the things that are important to me, like my marriage and how I'm spending time with my kids. So I'm a tracker in a lot of ways. I see no problem in tracking it every day. Now, every once in a while, I will find myself tracking something on a regular basis and just kind of looking at, like, I'm not taking any action to improve this. So there's no surprise when nothing changes or it Gets worse on there. So I think it's really unhealthy to check something without a plan in place, without something that could be moving the like, hey, I have a hypothesis if I do this, this number will move up and to the right or improve in some way. If there's no activity that could possib be leading to the change, then just relentless checking it I think is very unhealthy. But I think that checking the numbers on a frequent basis is absolutely vital. Can you imagine running a business without checking the numbers every week? I mean it's just, it's just preposterous. So your net worth is bigger than many businesses for many people listening to this.
- [04:49]
A
Okay, but I'm going to push back a little bit. You said, can you imagine not checking in on your business, running a business, you checking in, you can see, oh, trends are starting to go this way I can make a change and it will change in your net worth if you are invested in index funds, which is what the majority of everybody is suggesting now, invest in index funds. You checking in doesn't have any bearing on the results. So I can see somebody getting a little nervous, getting a little anxious during a bit of a downswing. And checking in obsessively would be detrimental. So for somebody who might not be benefiting from checking in as frequently as you do, what's the longest, the widest span that you would suggest somebody check in on their network worth?
- [05:35]
B
I think you should check in every month. And look, should you be relentlessly updating the portfolio value of your all index fund stock portfolio on a daily basis? No, that's probably very unhealthy. I completely agree. But should you be checking in on what your spending looks like month to date? If you check in that every day again, if you're spending 30 minutes doing this, that's totally unreasonable. But if you're just swiping the app to refresh and saying, oh, my goal was $7,000 in spending this month and, and it's halfway through the month and I'm at 4,000, like that's not unhealthy, that that's helpful. That that allows you to change behavior and course correct for the rest of the month.
- [06:08]
A
Okay, I, I think that's a great answer, Scott. When you said net worth, I was just thinking stocks and investments. But yeah, your expenses are going to contribute greatly to your net worth. That's a, that's a great reminder.
- [06:19]
B
How often do you check it, Mindy?
- [06:20]
A
My net worth, I check almost never.
- [06:24]
B
How often does Carl Check it.
- [06:25]
A
I was going to say I'm balanced out by Carl, who checks it every single day.
- [06:29]
B
I love it. Well, should we get into it? Let, let's. Let's actually go and set this thing up and let's preview it. How much does Monarch cost?
- [06:36]
A
Monarch. Well, Scott, let's go in there and see. I am going to share my screen. I am on the Monarch Money website. It says up here, get 30% off your first year with code. Welcome. I am going to sign up with Code Pockets, P, O, C K E T S. And that will get me 50% off. And that's good for everybody who's listening to this podcast today.
- [06:58]
B
Yeah, I think it's like 100 bucks a year. So it's like 50 bucks for the first year if you use the code Pockets when you sign up.
- [07:04]
A
All right, let's begin by connecting the account where most of your spending happens.
- [07:08]
B
The first thing that Monarch's going to do as you sign up is they're going to have you connect an account because the tool is useless. It's not. It's not. There's no value. If you're, if you're not willing to share the data from your credit card statement or your bank accounts or your investment portfolio with Monarch, then the entire premise is shot. It doesn't, it doesn't like. The whole point is this is. This connects in real time with all these financial institutions. So you have to get over this fear that a lot of people have of sharing that data. And if you can't, then use a spreadsheet. Right. Do not use this app if you can't get over that fear. You know, I will say that Mindy and I have, you know, fairly large numbers in our personal portfolios, and we have no problem sharing this data in real time with these aggregators. The advantages of having it all clearly in place and be able to spot these things is so huge. And there's also additional safety that I view in sharing these numbers. Yes, there's risk always in sharing any data around there, but some of the safety that I perceive is, is when I check my statement, right, I'm. I'm rolling this or updating it on a regular basis, and if there's a big spike or drop, I know it's instantaneously. The app also lets me know from an alerts perspective if there is like a finance charge or something like that in there. So I can see these things in more real time. And that. That offers protection that you don't get. If you do not share the data. So there's, there's only trade offs in this world. There's no, there's no perfectly free thing. But by and large, I think the benefits of sharing my data with Monarch far, far, far, far, far outweigh the risks. And I think a million people agree with me on that. So, you know, if you, if you're, if you're truly absurdly wealthy, maybe you have a different view on that. But I think that for most people with less than, you know, $50 million in net worth, this is probably a good tool.
- [08:46]
A
I have less than $50 million in net worth, Scott. So you are correct. So Plaid is asking me to log into Chase on my phone. So hang on a second, let me do that. All right, so this popped up on my computer and it is actually, it's asking me four different steps. What accounts of mine at my bank do I wish to connect with? I checked all of my credit cards and my bank, my actual bank account.
- [09:15]
B
And this is important because I have, for example, I bank with Wells Fargo and I have accounts that are personal and accounts that are business. And I choose to not share my business accounts with Monarch because I don't include those in my personal net worth statement. Those are cash. Presumably any cash in the business is required to run the business. And so I leave that cash in there and don't consider it my property until I distribute it from the business to myself.
- [09:44]
A
That is a great way to keep everything separate, Scott. I like that a lot. I think we talk to a lot of people who maybe don't keep everything so separate. And I like, I like keeping things separate too.
- [09:55]
B
And another one I exclude is, is I have an account that I set aside cash that I believe is a conservative estimate of what I'll need to pay come tax time. And so I'll leave that and exclude that from my personal net worth statement as well. That's not mine, that's the government's money. I'm just holding it for them and receiving interest.
- [10:10]
A
Okay, I have connected my bank and now I am going to hit skip for now. And let's see. Connect your bank and credit cards. Okay, I just did that. Oh, now I have to connect my credit cards. Okay, so I logged into my credit card and Monarch, it asks if I can connect the accounts. Yes, please connect everything. Which do you want? I want them all and authorize. So when you set up your account, at first you are going to have to connect all of your accounts. I think that like you said, Scott, there's almost no point in doing this if you're not going to connect your account so you can have a holistic view of everything that's going on.
- [10:54]
B
I even go further and I'll say that it's, it's just not, it's not even that helpful to connect some of your accounts. It's just the whole point of this is to have a command center that has everything feeding into it. All of your expenses, all of your, all of your investments that you want to track here because they all, they're all, they're all interconnected and interflowing into one financial picture. Picture.
- [11:13]
A
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- [11:24]
B
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- [11:59]
A
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- [12:24]
B
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- [12:26]
A
Savor responsibly.
- [12:32]
B
All right, let's take that into account and jump back in. Once everything's connected, you'll see something like this dashboard here.
- [12:41]
A
At the outset, I need to connect more things. I don't have my investments connected here. My investment accounts.
- [12:47]
B
Are your, all your spending accounts connected at this point?
- [12:50]
A
I believe so.
- [12:51]
B
This is what's so powerful about this is we can already see just with the spending accounts. Hey, here's how things are tracking this month versus last month, which I think is super powerful in terms of spending your General household. So it's a very powerful tool. You can see, you can see what's going on here. Mindy's like, I spend so much money. And yet, Mindy, when we see, when we show your net worth, it's like, this is such a. A small percentage of your net worth. It's such a responsible level of spending for someone in your position here. And you're going to be like, oh, I spent so much on there. I'll tell you this. I spend more than that right now in my life. Look on the cash flow tab, because I think this is one of the things that's super awesome about this is, yeah, you can see this cash flow and it says, we haven't hooked up your income yet to the story. But you can see from a spending perspective, the AI is pretty good. Scroll down the page a little bit. You can see it automatically tagged a bunch of these categories for expenses so you don't have to. Let's go see how accurate they were. Let's go to. Let's click on the shopping tab. Because there's not perfect. The AI is not perfect. You will have to change some things. But this says, hey, there's some Amazon orders guitar ver. Some. What is that?
- [13:55]
A
Carl bought some guitar parts.
- [13:56]
B
So that's shopping. Yeah. So that's inaccurate. That's an accurate.
- [13:58]
A
Glad I have Amazon stock in my portfolio.
- [14:01]
B
I think a lot of people's position might look like this. Right. And, and so you can, like sometimes, you know, if we order groceries or whatever, it'll still show from Amazon if we order from Whole Foods for delivery every once in a while, but. So you can go and tag any one of these. These items here, but it will auto populate them. Let's go to another category and see how the AI did.
- [14:19]
A
Let's go back to medical. Let's see what we've got. Oh, yeah. Well, that's pretty, pretty accurate. Anthem is my health insurance premiums. And Cloud Medical is my concierge medical service. Entertainment and recreation. Let's see what they see. The carnival. Yes. Recreation.gov $2. Well, okay. I'm glad they got that one right.
- [14:42]
B
That government's a real party.
- [14:43]
A
Red rocks. Tick pics. We bought tickets to something I can't remember. Oh, the Beach Boys. We just went and saw the Beach Boys Spotify. So this all looks good. Restaurants and bars. That's a restaurant. Those are all restaurants. Payrik's. Is that a restaurant? Oh, sweet cow. Yep, that's the ice cream place in our town. Yep, that's all restaurants and bars.
- [15:06]
B
You can see how if you were to swipe this on a regular basis every day, and then you go up to the top, like you just like you log into the app. And this is also a great phone app, by the way. But if you go to the very top of this page here and you go back to cash flow, you can see, hey, if that spikes up, or better yet, even on the dashboard, you go to the dashboard real quick and you're like, oh, I had a huge leap here from day 22 to 24. I should probably take a look at that. That I spent something big there. Do I know what that was? What was going on with that? Then we know we've got a problem. That's the value of swiping this thing on a regular basis. Just taking a quick look. I mean, it literally takes less than 10 seconds once you swipe it. Or maybe emit maybe 60 seconds if we're being realistic about loading and all that kind of stuff. That's the power of looking at the thing every day, not obsessing over your stock market balance. And then you can say, oh, I'm surprised by this expense, or I'm not, or I really don't like that number. Like Mindy's response there. That's how I feel some months, how.
- [16:05]
A
Did I spend $3,000 in one day?
- [16:07]
B
That's why this tool is so powerful. And you can see Mindy didn't have to tag all her expenses and categorize them and tabulate them. It did it for her. And if you think those are reasonable outputs, that's the power of the increasing AI. Now, it's not perfect. And I do have to go back over the course of the year and look at all the different categories and look through my transactions. Every once in a while, I'll mischaracterize a transaction. This gets especially confusing if and when there are business transfers for investments or when I'm paying for, like, legal or tax planning advice or whatever. There seems to be a challenge with those. Another big expense for me is I pay my own taxes, so it considers those an expense. And I don't really like to think about them that way. It's not really like a spending category for me. It's not perfect for. But you can see it's pretty good at what it does.
- [16:55]
A
Yeah. And you know what, Scott? A couple of years ago, I tracked my spending with a Google form on my phone that went into a Google sheet that showed me where all my spending was. And I thought that was Great for tracking in real time, but it's also really kind of time consuming. Every time you're making a purchase, you have to remember to put it in there. So what I like about Monarch is that it's. It's not quite real time, especially if you're only checking it once a month. But it's real time enough that you can go in here and say, oh, my goodness, on day 24, you're like, what's this big jump here? I mean, even back here on day 23, I. I doubled. Okay, that's not really such a good example. But last month on day 24, I spent $3,000. So that's something, if I wasn't aware of that, that's something that I can use to keep track of potential fraud or I can use to keep my husband on board and say, hey, what are we swiping $3,000 for? I'm sure it was an actual thing we talked about, but not everybody is as communicative with their spouse about money as my husband and I are. So this is. This is a pretty powerful tool.
- [18:03]
B
Let's go to budget real quick. I'm going to show that one off real quick. We got to all say a big thank you to Mindy because she's being breathtakingly transparent with her finances on this particular show. Something that I would not feel this comfortable with. So thank you, Mindy, for doing that. Oh, sure.
- [18:17]
A
Why do I have $120 in income?
- [18:20]
B
Mindy? It looks like. It looks like you spend 10 to $12,000 a month was what I saw on the. The first slide in there, or at least 10 to 12,000 last month. So let's say you have $12,000 to spend.
- [18:30]
A
That is a good point. Okay, now I can continue keep.
- [18:34]
B
I just want to call it one thing, Mindy, before we go on this, could you go back one, two more here? You can also do this other type category budget, which is another way of kind of. Kind of going about it here. This is how I do it on there, which I think is a little. A little easier for me, is it just groups all the expenses into these buckets and then I just go through and put them in. This helps me a little bit more because I know, oh, I spent this much in food and dining this month.
- [18:57]
A
You know what? I like this better. And did you notice it saved all of the inputs and just moved them to a different place? I like that. So you can try this version. If you don't like it, you can go try the other version. And you don't have to re enter everything. I'm probably gonna do $500 here, Mindy.
- [19:12]
B
We meet at a coffee shop weekly. I guess that. I guess that's a business expense.
- [19:15]
A
That's a business expense, Scott. And I separate my business and personal expenses. Thank you very much.
- [19:20]
B
You're right. Yeah. All right.
- [19:22]
A
Fun money. Let's do 250 per month on that shopping. Apparently, that's my big one. So let's do 600 there and look to cut that back.
- [19:31]
B
Oh, Mindy, you're already at like 760 though.
- [19:33]
A
Clothing. Scott, I am currently in the middle of a. An epic weight loss journey, and clothing is something that I am going to have to swap out for the next few months because nothing fits anymore, which is a good problem.
- [19:48]
B
That's awesome. Congratulations.
- [19:49]
A
My gym membership. Love to go there. Medical. I think that's going to be about 650amonth. Oops. And dentist.
- [19:57]
B
Ooh.
- [19:58]
A
I think that's. Let's call that 50amonth because I can't remember how much that actually is. Financial fees, cash, and ATM taxes is not something I am very good at budgeting for and need to get better at business. Don't need any business here. So here we go. I still have a lot of money left to budget.
- [20:17]
B
I would suggest if you're going through this exercise the first time for folks, Mindy, you may be different on this, but I would suggest you put in $2,000 into miscellaneous or one to $2,000. Because I find that when I do a grounds bottoms up budget and guess at my numbers, my actual spending is at least that much higher in a given month because of all the quirks of life that go in and my lapses as a human being in terms of adhering to certain of those categories that I set for myself.
- [20:44]
A
I have 2600 left to budget. I don't really think I spend 12,000amonth on average. So I'm going to keep this as just extra and I'm going to continue.
- [20:56]
B
Yeah. Without that big spike last month. That looks pretty close to what you might be spending. Yeah.
- [21:00]
A
All right. View my budget. Income, gifts and donations. I have to refill out auto and transport. Oh, it looks like I spent, but I didn't have any money in there for it. Interesting. I like how it's red too, so it tells me you did something wrong or you went over budget.
- [21:17]
B
Well, let's click on it. Let's. Let's click on it and see the expense there. So let's click on auto and transport. And go into there. So it says Denver public parking. You spent 21 bucks parking at Denver and you didn't have that budgeted at the airport?
- [21:28]
A
I sure did. You know what? That is a good point. Let's go back to the budget. Let's go to.
- [21:34]
B
Yeah, you can click on it. Oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah.
- [21:37]
A
Auto payment, parking and tolls. So let's. Do you know what? I'm probably going to do about $75 a month in parking and tolls, taxis and ride shares. I'm going to do 25 because those are. I'm either not doing any or I'm doing a ton. Auto payment. I don't have public transit. Gas.
- [21:53]
B
Ooh.
- [21:54]
A
I've got two electric vehicles and two gas vehicles. So I'm going to go $50 a month because I don't actually spend that much on the gas and auto maintenance. Ooh. I just went way over budget on the auto maintenance. This zero. I just put $3,000 into my car. But that's not something that I'm going to have to do. I should. You know what? I should have auto maintenance in here because I have a 1987 and a 2003. I can pretty much guarantee something's going to break. Okay.
- [22:19]
B
No budget for home improvement.
- [22:20]
A
Did I miss that? Oh, there we go. Wow. This month it's probably going to be $2,000. What did I spend here? Oh, $200, $184, 175 and 172,200. Sounds good. I have most of the supplies already.
- [22:34]
B
Knowing you, there is no world in which home improve. Even after you build a brand new home from scratch with all new materials and finishes.
- [22:42]
A
Wow. That's like you know me or something. Scott, I think this is good to start. Oh, look, I'm already over budget on this. Entertainment and recreation. Why? What happened here? Oh, the carnival. Oh, tick pic. Yeah, we got tickets to the beach boys, so. But I love how easy this is to just click on it and see. Oh, this is sad. No transactions in this period for fun money. Well, I guess I'm going to have to change that. And I've already gone over budget on shopping. Hey, Scott, it's August 12th that we're recording this and I've gone over budget on my shopping. I need to rein that in, I guess. Show 2 unbudgeted. What is that?
- [23:20]
B
Or just give yourself more there. That's a great reason to go over budget.
- [23:23]
A
Yes. Okay, how about this? 800. Now I'm good again because we are just setting this up for funsies. I would be more conscious of what you are actually choosing and changing when you change your budget, have a reason for it or take it from someplace else. I am just showing you how easy it is to change things on your budget show too unbudgeted. Too unbudgeted means I don't have any money in there for child. I don't have childcare expenses and child activities don't start up until next year when Daphne starts playing lacrosse in the spring. Okay. So I think this is pretty good. I have $1,800 left to budget. Scott, would you recommend $0 budgeting? Is that when every dollar is accounted for or would you recommend left to budget so you could give yourself some grace in some of these categories?
- [24:11]
B
What I think Monarch is really good at is it is a wonderful way to track where you're at and where you've been. Right. You can see your net worth journey over time. It's like think about it as the accounting arm, the historical data set for your financial journey. Right. I've been in this for years. I have years worth of financial data. I can see the trend lines and all these different categories of spending and my wealth. What I don't, what I what personally, what I don't think it, it helps me do personally is I don't comply with my budget because of Monarch. The same way I know where my spending is and I can course correct. But I use a different tool called cube money to force myself to stay inside of my budget that actually funds certain accounts in there and that, that is what allows me to really stay on track with my, my spending. This is more of like an accounting item here. So some ability to say here's some reports or goals or investments or whatever. But if I really want to like project out what is a retirement calculator, I'll use a different calculator and then I just use this as like here's where all my money is, boom, boom, boom, boom. And here's what's invested in so I can use that as the input source for it. It makes keeping a tabulation on everything very simple. But it's not the tool I use to project the future or to force myself to stay inside these boxes for my budget.
- [25:25]
A
Now that's interesting. So I like to try and stay within my budgeting my budget categories. I'm going to want to know why I've got $4 here. I'm going to want to check that out. Pets. Oh, I was going to say I don't have a pet, but my daughter, look at this. This is so great. My daughter has a lizard and it's not a dog or a cat walking all over the place. It sits in its little box and I forgot that I buy it crickets. Every other week I buy $2 worth of crickets. So I'm going to put $10 in here just in case he has a big eating day. I'm not going to change this one. I do want to have the red here, but I love how they keep giving me more things that I forgot I spent money on. That's the thing. When you're just swiping a card, it kind of doesn't register as much as oh, look at this I went through and now I have, I have one red category.
- [26:19]
B
It is very powerful just doing that. And we'll help some people for that, but just me personally, I find this is not the tool that actually helps me comply with my spending. But for some people it may be plenty.
- [26:29]
A
When we're back from our final ad break, I will be syncing all of my investment accounts so we can get a clear picture of how to use this tool to track net worth. Every once in a while you do something that makes you feel like a real grownup, like making your own dentist appointment and then actually going, that's grown up. What about setting up life insurance so your family's protected? That's like super grown up. Policygenius makes finding and buying life insurance simple. It's a marketplace that helps ensure your loved ones have a financial safety net in case something happens to you, whether that's covering routine expenses or investing the money for long term security. You can compare quotes from top insurers and find coverage that fits your needs and your budget. And get this with Policygenius, you can find life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage. That's an easy way to protect the people you love and feel good about the future. You'll get clear options, support from licensed agents who guide you, step and no guesswork, just clarity, coverage and peace of mind. Secure your family's future with Policygenius. Head to Policygenius.com to compare free life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save.
- [27:35]
B
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- [28:24]
A
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- [30:05]
B
But for booking her trip to Paris.
- [30:07]
A
Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia, she bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674.
- [30:15]
B
Steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
- [30:18]
A
You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your.
- [30:22]
B
Trip Expedia made to travel flight Inclusive.
- [30:26]
A
Packages are atoll protected.
- [30:32]
B
All right, thanks for sticking with us. Let's update the conversation starting right now in real time. The second really important powerful component of Monarch is giving you a up to date near current picture of your net worth. And so for that we're going to have to insert a bunch of investment accounts that includes every 401k every Roth IRA if those are in different holdings, any other after tax brokerage accounts and then there will be manual accounts. So for me as a real estate investor, I do have to input my properties in there and we'll show that in a second.
- [31:06]
A
This is a pretty good. Well, this is a terrible snapshot of my investment holdings because it says I have zero and I have a little bit more than that. So I'm going to attach my accounts which should give a fairly good idea of what's going on. I do have a couple of private equity investments that I will have to figure out how to display here. But I am going to go into accounts and add an account. I'm going to go to connect investments and loans. I am going to connect my Fidelity account. Everybody knows I have Fidelity accounts because I just made one out with my friend Frank. Okay, you're being taken to Fidelity, by.
- [31:46]
B
The way, you may want to, if you have a pop up blocker enabled on your browser that may prevent you from being able to do this on the desktop version. And by the way, I recommend that if you're going to use Monarch that you set it up on your computer, you can do it on your phone, but I think it's better to set it up on the computer dashboard and then you can download the app and review it and update it on your phone after that. And this is something you'll want to have some time set aside and mentally prepare for the frustration of logging in and remembering all the passwords, getting all those, doing the two factor authentication for all these old investment accounts you probably haven't checked in a while. If, for example, you have an old employer 401k or whatever or brokerage account from, you know, years back.
- [32:28]
A
Okay, and here is my Frankenomics portfolio. Earlier this morning it was up to 10, 124 and some change and now it's, it's gone down a little bit. Okay, Scott, let's look at how my investments are going. Oh, look at that. I'm doing better. I'm doing that better than the S P500. Didn't Warren Buffett have a bet going with somebody that he would beat the S P 500 over, like, 10 years? Hey, Warren. Call me. We'll have that. I'll make that same bet with you. Let's see. Year to date. Well, maybe I should rescind that offer to Warren. Look at this. When the S and P is down, I'm really down. And year to date. Oh, yikes.
- [33:10]
B
Okay, well, then it's impossible for me to tell this in many cases because the real estate is not valued on a regular basis super accurately. But it's a really cool tool. Here, click on dashboard. Now, I want to show you. This is the home base that suit. Super powerful for a lot of this. And you can change these blocks to be where you want to go. So there's a block down the page called Net Worth. This is not very helpful to you right now because it's dot on the page, but it becomes a chart the longer that you have this. And so that actually goes to the top of my page. It's one of the first things I look at when I pull up my dashboard. You can actually just move that right there to the top. And then there's a. The next piece that I like to see is like my spending, because that's the one I can control. So I'll look at that. And then I have transactions as the third one. But that's just my personal preferred layout in terms of how I use the tool. But it becomes very powerful. If you look at these three charts pretty regularly, you can see, okay, here's what's going on. Here's my recent transactions, and here's this. And then you can click into them and they take you to those areas.
- [34:13]
A
I like this because based on what your specific needs are, with Monarch Money, you can change things around.
- [34:20]
B
Mindy, let's add it. Let's add your house to the equation here. Can we. Can you go to accounts?
- [34:25]
A
Accounts?
- [34:25]
B
And then let's add. Let's add some real estate.
- [34:27]
A
All right. Other assets.
- [34:30]
B
So what I would do here is go back, go back, go back. Go to Zillow.
- [34:34]
A
Oh, my.
- [34:35]
B
And then put your address. And we can. We can blur this out here. But this is. This is kind of cool because it uses the Zestimate to update the value of your property in real time. Now, that could be a problem, right? If your estimate's super unwieldy for your property, that's going to be a Problem. And this estimate is not super perfect all the time, but it's reasonably close for me. Right. I believe that my property is not, you know, way off from the zestimate because I live in a suburb with lots of similar houses nearby. And so it's a very useful. It's very useful there as well to add that in. And then you can also add your car.
- [35:06]
A
I am going to add my. So I have a primary residence and I have a home that I am tearing down and rebuilding. Now this is wildly inaccurate for my primary residence, but I bet it's based off of the fact that I bought it for such a low price.
- [35:24]
B
Yep. So go to the type there and you can make this a secondary home or rental property.
- [35:28]
A
And can I. I can't alter this.
- [35:30]
B
No. If you want. So I'll show you another second how to do that. For another. For a property where you want to manually input the value.
- [35:36]
A
Okay. This is my primary. I would like to manually input the value of that one. The other one I think is. Is probably a good bet.
- [35:43]
B
Great. So go, go to add assets that same category and then go to add manual account. Oh, you could also have done what you just did. Sorry. Yeah. Then real estate, primary home. You will of course have to update this value periodically. You have to name it. So then of course it won't update from here.
- [35:59]
A
That's okay. So now what. Where did that move. Oh, look at that. That changed my net worth.
- [36:05]
B
Just a pitch now, Mindy, you have a mortgage, right?
- [36:08]
A
I do have a mortgage. Oh, you're going to make me add that. Is that an account?
- [36:14]
B
That'll be an account. You want to add an account and then you'll want to connect investments and loans.
- [36:20]
A
So I have. I ballparked it because I can't connect my account to get the exact amount in there, but I ballpark it a $300,000 mortgage. And that now changes my net worth a little bit because it takes that 300,000 off of my entire net worth because it's now a liability that I didn't have entered in there before. So this is only going to be as accurate as you entering all of your accounts. So if you've got a credit card, put it in there. You've got a bank account, put it in there. If you've got investment accounts, put them all in there and make sure that all of your accounts are connected to get the holistic look at your entire financial position. Okay. We're getting a little closer. I know that there are some accounts that I am Missing here.
- [37:07]
B
How does Carl check your net worth every day?
- [37:10]
A
He uses empower.
- [37:11]
B
Okay, so if you already have something set up and you're trying to switch over to Monarch, you could just go there as well and look up all your accounts. But I'm constantly, I'm, I'm still fit in with this thing and I've been using it for years just to get little things right. Like today I updated my car because I realized one wasn't using the vin. So it's a process to do, to do that probably a good, good cadence is once a month or once a quarter you go in, you check your spending, you make sure everything's categorized correctly and the AI didn't screw up and categorize your CPA bill as a personal spending item or whatever it is. And then, and then you can kind of correct course correct on your spending behavior, course correct on your investment approach or your financial plan or you know, fiddle with, with investment accounts, make sure that they're not updated. I just looked at mine and it looks like my HSA hasn't been linked in like two months. So for the last update it's actually updated that today. So there's definitely maintenance required for keeping these accounts active.
- [38:01]
A
Yes. And I think the last piece of the puzzle is we're in the middle of an ill timed transfer. So the Robinhood should bump up and capture almost the entirety of the rest of our net worth. Once that goes through, this is going to consume the rest of my day. Scott, I think you can get pretty.
- [38:18]
B
Far if you want to just look at your spending and you hook up your bank accounts and your credit cards. You should be able to do that in less than an hour and begin fiddling with, with useful inputs. If you want to get a truly up to date net worth tracker and you're a fire individual that has more than just, you know, just a couple of simple investment accounts. You may be spending quite a bit of time linking up the whatever, whoever services your mortgage and fiddling with your old HSA or 401k or whatever. So I would definitely set aside a day or figure that you're going to do three quarters of it in the first setting and it will take you another couple weeks or a month to fully round out the product there. And then, you know, you want to set up your dashboard and then from there I just look at it and there and that helps me, you know, when we're going to set up our budget it's pretty easy to say is this realistic? Nope. Because we, we spend Way more than that every month for the last 12 months. That's not a good budget on this, on this particular item. It's very helpful when you're, when you're doing that and the week, the monthly, the monthly financial review with your spouse or whatever is, is just a few minutes of looking at this thing. So I find that very helpful.
- [39:22]
A
Yes. So much easier once you have all of the information in one spot. I don't have to go and look at my individual credit card statements and look at my bank account and look at our investments. And like we have investments in multiple different platforms, we're still consolidating those. So trying to gather all of that information is going to be kind of a hassle for the monthly money meeting. But for everything to be in one place, it's super easy to keep an overview of where things are going and keep track of trends. And Scott, when I said I was going to spend the rest of the day on this, I meant that I am just going to be fascinated and play and tweak and move things around and double check that I have all the accounts in here as opposed to. It's going to take me all day to do this. Now I'm just going to play. I mean, how long did this take? Like 45 minutes or an hour to set all of this up? I didn't have to go gather up all my logins. So if you have those all in one place, like you use a password manager because that's a really great way to make your life easier.
- [40:21]
B
Yeah. Or if you just have the same insecure password for all of your financial accounts, which we do not Recommend.
- [40:25]
A
Yes. No. Password 123 is not a password for anything that I use.
- [40:29]
B
If you're like me and you have old accounts and all that kind of stuff, this is a great way to set up your password manager and update all those accounts at once. That will be very painful and tedious, but then you can get them all into your password manager as well if you choose to use that. So this process, kill two birds with one stone.
- [40:44]
A
All right, Scott, this was a lot of fun.
- [40:46]
B
You're going to like this, Mindy, if you've never used it before. I think it's the best net worth tracker spending tracker software in existence right now. For normal folks that have relatively normal ish financial positions and are looking to accumulate. I do think the limitations are, it's not super great if you have a lot of sprawling private investments. Like you got 30 rental properties. This is not your tool. There will be some benefits to using this in other capacities, but it's not going to really help you achieve that goal. But if you have mostly publicly traded investments in retirement accounts, for example, this is a very, very powerful way to track your finances, check your net worth regularly, understand your spending, set a basic budget and all those kinds of things. So I, and it's pretty cheap, I think like 100 bucks a year for this. The amount of time this saves me is pretty incredible.
- [41:35]
A
Yeah, this is going to be really a fantastic tool. I can't wait to obsess over this.
- [41:41]
B
Well, cool. Well, it was fun to set this up with you today. Mindy. Thanks for, for giving us a glimpse into your finances in so much detail here. Glimpse is not the right word. An in depth breakdown of your finances, mostly complete. And what Was this like 30, 35, 45 minutes?
- [41:55]
A
It is fairly easy to set up. You have all of your logins anyway, so you just enter them as you go. I believe I will remember more things as I'm sitting here looking at this. Oh yeah, I forgot about this credit card, this one off random card or I forgot about this, this one investment that isn't in any of these other places. But I think it's a great way to get a snapshot of your finances. And as I get used to coming in and looking at this dashboard, it's going to be really easy to like, oh, doing great today or ooh, this month is really not looking good spend wise. I can't wait to see all the money that I'm spending on this house to build and I want to keep track of that in my holistic financial overview. So that's why I created that new category. I would love to hear from our viewers. Do you like Monarch Money? What specific parts of it do you love and what tabs along the side am I missing that I need to go back and dive into a little bit more? You can email Mindy biggerpocketsmoney.com you can email Scott@biggerpocketsmoney.com we'd love to hear from you.
- [42:57]
B
Absolutely. And as a reminder, Monarch is finally, after all these years, sponsoring the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. We have a regular advertising arrangement with them. They did not ask us to do this video. We want to do this video for two reasons. One, we love Monarch. We're super excited to have them as a sponsor, but also we want to blow them away by helping more people discover them. So if you do want to use Monarch, please use the code pockets when you sign up, you'll get 50% off instead of the 30% off that you would get without a specific code for that first year. It's 50 bucks for your first year. It's a powerful tool. Let them know that you found it. With BiggerPockets money, that helps us and allows us to keep making all this content for free. Because we make money when folks watch our content or listen to our content and view or potentially act on the ads. So we hope this was helpful. We are super proud and excited to be sponsored by Monarch Money.
- [43:42]
A
Thank you, Monarch. And if again, we would love to hear from you. So don't hesitate to reach out to Scott or I. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?
- [43:48]
B
Let's do it.
- [43:49]
A
That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying Toodaloo. Boo.