Welcome to the Portfolio Monitor.

The Goal

The goal of this independent application is to assist users in monitoring their assets, income, expenses and savings and to project future retirement savings assets so that their goals and ultimately a secure retirement can be achieved. Your personal financial planner should always be consulted for advice, and this application can provide information to help start the conversation.

What is the Portfolio Monitor

The Portfolio Monitor (sometimes referred to as a retirement calculator) is a web-based service that allows you to model your finances including your accounts, assets, debts, income and expenses. It provides an easy to read report similar to a net worth statement, however it also includes future retirement wealth projections, diversification and other statistics about your portfolio.

The Portfolio Monitor maintains limited history of how your portfolio is growing over time.

Additionally, the Portfolio Monitor will automatically update the values of your stocks, mutual funds and ETF holdings so that you can monitor the current value of the portfolio.

The Portfolio Monitor allows multiple portfolios for each user, and also has the ability to copy a portfolio in order to make some 'what if' changes in order to understand the impact of making a purchas or an investment change.

It does not provide specific investment recommendations or advice, but rather provides general information about your portfolio which is useful for you and your advisor. The report allows you to see your account holdings, income, expenses and goals in an objective and orderly way.

For more information about the algorithm, see Assumptions and Methodology

Who should use it and why

This Portfolio Monitor can be used for working or retirement age persons to analyze their finances:

• Early Career - helps you understand what is the right savings rate so that you can plan for your retirement, while also funding current responsibilities (including entertainment). It will help you understand whether you can afford an expense such as a exotic vacation, a new car, an electronic toy or other luxury item.
• Middle Career - helps you understand if you are still saving at the right rate in order to fund significant life expenses such as family travel, college, unexpected job loss and retirement.
• Pre-Retirement - helps you understand if you are actually on track for your desired retirement.
• Already Retired - helps you understand your spend down rate and helps you understand if your money will last your entire life when market conditions change, as well as whether or not you can afford that dream vacation.

Do you wonder if you can really afford a large expense? What is the impact on your goals if you buy something? How much can you spend and how much should you save?

Sensitive Information

An important feature of the Portfolio Monitor that distinguishes it from online retirement planners provided by brokerage firms and independent retirement planners is that it allows you to more accurately model investments from all investment sources and produce an analysis suitable for discussing with your professional financial advisor. While other retirement applications allow you to automatically download data from your bank, the data is many times not uniform and gives an inaccurate view of your finances. Finally, do you really want to store all of your sensitive financial account access information in one place? The Portfolio Monitor does not use any sensitive banking or brokerage information and therefore doesn't store any sensitive information.

For ease of use, and to avoid manually inputting information each time you access it, the Portfolio Monitor allows your account holdings to be copied and pasted from tables in your bank or brokerage online portfolio view. By doing so, you are able to automatically import only your numeric holding data without allowing access to any sensitive information.

Note: There is a "Help" link on each input page with key information, instructions and helpful hints specific to the input page.

When should you use it

The Portfolio Monitor can be used daily, but is best used monthly or quarterly as a tool to analyze your portfolio. It can provide important information helping you to better understand when you should rebalance or schedule an appointment with your financial advisor.

Don't be intimidated by the data entry - it is worth the time and effort. After your first round of data entry, future updates take less time as some information is entered only one time. The program will learn how you enter your investment data and will make it easier each time by pre-filling some data. The data entry is designed to be as easy as possible without automatic download from your financial institutions which requires providing sensitive data.

Why was it designed

The developer of this service was unsatisfied with other retirement planner tools, therefore initially designed the Portfolio Monitor to better meet general portfolio monitoring and analysis needs.

It was designed to provide ongoing monitoring of assets and expenses in a unified way across all investment holdings by allowing flexible data entry to accurately model specific situations, while eliminating all security vulnerabilities caused by storing sensitive client information.

In order to most accurately estimate retirement expenses, the Portfolio Monitor uses detailed anticipated expenses at various times in life - not the same expenses month after month for eternity nor a fixed percentage of pre-retirement earnings. The use of more accurate retirement expense estimates yields the most accurate and reliable plan projection.

Donations

If the Portfolio Monitor is helpful to you, please consider donating to help with the ongoing expenses to keep it up and running.

Contact Us

The administrator can be contacted at blog.arewethereyet@gmail.com. Please note that we are unable to answer any financial questions - only questions on how to use the Portfolio Monitor website. For more information, see the website main page at Main Page.

Share this site with your friends so that all of you have a comfortable retirement celebrating together.

If you notice a problem with this site, please report the bug by emailing the administrator, so we can improve this application. The developer of this application is also retired, and works on it as time permits so please be patient for updates or enhancements. The application may stop working as normal due to changes outside our control, and the developer of the application will work on these issue as soon as possible.

About Us

See our story on the main blog web page Main Page

License and Privacy Policy

This Portfolio Monitor calculator tool requires users to create a user account. There is a License Agreement and Privacy Policy that must be signed to use this application. The Privacy Policy is integrated into the License Agreement.

Disclosure and Cookie Policy

This Portfolio Monitor calculator tool may have advertising or paid content. It also uses cookies, please see the Disclosure and Cookie Policy.

Discussion

Advertising

If you would like to advertise here please email the administrator.

Reporting Defects

Users of this portfolio monitor can report any defects or enhancement requests to help improve this software and make it more reliable by sending email to the administrator.