I meant changing the credit and debit accounts.
Something like Bank-> Insurance
becomes Insurance -> Bank
Calculating my wealth
- Thread starter OxygeN
- Start date
Something like Bank-> Insurance
becomes Insurance -> Bank
It all depends on the level of granularity you want
If you want to be really precise, you will indeed need at least CHF and USD accounts for the cash. And then, you will need one account for each of your position. But it would make sense to keep these accounts in the currency of the share (USD for VT), no? And you could add something towards fees if you want to be really precise. But it depends on whether you want to track your expenses or your net worth or both?
Ah, you meant inverting (not reverting)!
Now it's clear.I think I will handle it as follows:
I'll register the reimbursement under a sub-account of "Other Income", e.g. "Reimbursements Health Insurance". Because such a reimbursement is not really a reduction of a monthly health insurance fee I pay - it's just money that I got back because of some medical treatments (in this case new glasses) covered by my health insurance.
That's the main criteria, indeed. But as I'm now filling GnuCash with transactions and started to understand double-entry accounting a little bit, it becomes very interesting to me to be as accurate as possible. OK, I admit it - it's a bit OCD... but who is immune to OCD at all?It all depends on the level of granularity you want
Well, the cash accounts need to be in their respective currency (CHF and USD for the time being). This is a fact.
For the positions (im my case only VT for now) I'm a bit uncertain: yes, it is true that VT is in USD, so this it would make more sense to keep it in USD. OTOH, when I look at IBKR I see my portfolio displayed in my home currency (CHF). I might tend to the USD-variant, which makes more sense: I just have to remember that if I want to know how much I'd be making, I have to check on IBKR and not in my accounting software.
What I'm aiming at is to track all my finances with GnuCash: expenses and net worth. This is where I do have some questions still:
- How to enter in GnuCash my apartment, which I bought?
The asset is probably the 100% value of it, right? But then somewhere I have also the mortgage (money lent to me by the bank) - that should be put under "loans" and should be deducted from my wealth, correct? The mortgage fees I'm paying are already dealt with (as expenses). - How to register the monthly money transfers I make into VT?
Simply add them to the IBKR VT Investment account and ignore the fact that it is not a real-time representation of the actual value on IBKR? This, because I just sort of "sample" the value maybe once or twice a year from IBKR and put it in my accounting software and in the meantime I also add money from my checking account (via "CHF --> USD" conversion). - How to handle 2nd and 3rd pillars?
I thought I would add two accounts as "Assets", one for each pillar. For the 2nd pillar I would just once a year update the value according to the statement received by the 2nd pillar company. For the 3rd pillar, I would've chosen the same tactic as for investments: I pick the value at a specific date, then add to this "Assets" account the monthly contributions and ignore the possible deviations from what is the real value. Then a couple of times per year I would adapt it to match.
What do you think of the above?
Yes, you can declare the value as 100% and declare the loan as well so that the total value will be accurate to what you are actually owning.
This is indeed not ideal. I do not report "transactions" between accounts in my case. So I simply increase the number of shares of IB and decrease the value of cash. I do not see a great solution to take all the variability into account.
I think it's fine to update it to the real value a few times a year.
That sounds reasonable. I update my second and third pillar value each month. But again, I do not track when money was transferred to my 3a, so it's easier.
So in fact, the value of my net assets is indeed including 100% of the real estate price I paid - even though I've got a mortgage which is a loan (money I didn't/don't have).
I think updating this value once every couple (or 5) years (by having an evaluation from the bank where my mortgage is), could make sense - what do you think?
You mean you don't register transactions between your IBKR accounts (CHF/USD)?
And can you explain the part where you increase the number of shares? Doing so would require to always have an up-to-date share value, right?
Yes, probably this is the most comfortable way. Even though I like the details (I'm a bit OCD), I don't want to go too deep...
So you do not register the transaction from your checking account into the 3A account? That would actually be wrong, I guess, as you would have less money in your checking account, but your accounting software wouldn't know about that decrease...
Yes, it makes sense to me. I have not yet updated the value of our house in our
Here is how I do things (it works for me, but may not work for you). I consider expense tracking and net worth to be two different things. And I use a software I wrote for me.
- I track all my expenses earnings into categories, but I do not care where it was spent from. For instance, I register 100 CHF spent for coffee. But I do not register whether I used cash, my neon account or my Migros account. For me, this is not interesting.
- I keep track of the value of each assets. For assets tied to the stock market, I register number of shares. And my software updates the share value every day. For other assets, I simply register their value once a month.
OK, that's fair and YMMV - to me it's quite interesting to know where money came in and was spent out from.
So you have an automation, which retrieves the values of your shares the moment you open your software (or when you manually trigger it). Where do you get the data from and how? Some subscription to an API interface? I'd like to try this out for myself as well within GnuCash, as I know it supports this feature as well.
Yes, my software runs as a server and grabs share prices for my ETFs once a day. I am using the Python yfinance API to get that.
Yes, I use the yfinance Python module to access the data from Yahoo Finance. This is free indeed, but if you use too much you can get rate limited.
Care to share the details?
I was just reading that Yahoo Finance API has been unofficially discontinued... suggestions are to use AlphaVantage, for example...
