Personal Finance -- Not Ready For Prime Time -- September 29, 2024

Locator: 48436PERSINV.

This is a personal note as part of a conversation with one of my extended family members. Four extended family members -- including the individual to whom this note was addressed and myself -- are undertaking a formal personal finance course.

Remember: I'm 73 years old and have been investing for decades.

To an extended family member, not ready for prime time, under the break.

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Personal Finance

Dear _____

I've mentioned that "personal finance course" that four of us are taking.

You have no idea how helpful the "personal finance course" has been for me. Seriously.

Two big things:

1. It gave me an opportunity to take another look at how I approach investing and am now passing this information to [other extended family members]. From my blog as a direct result of the "personal finance course":

https://themilliondollarway.blogspot.com/2024/09/it-really-can-make-difference-comparing.html

2. The one thing I was missing was "Mint."  I was completely unaware of "Mint" but now I know that "Mint" is/was part of the large family of "account aggregators."

I found googling Rocket Money vs Mint vs Schwab quite helpful.

One of the hits was a "Reddit" hit -- I can't think of a much less credible site than Reddit (LOL) but it does provide a starting point for folks like me who don't understand a particular subject, in this case, "account aggregators" or "Mint" or Rocket Money.

As you know, I am very partial to Schwab and Schwab offers this service. From Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Schwab/comments/198dven/anyone_use_schwab_as_an_account_aggregator/

One comment that jumped out, of course, posted nine months ago:

I use Schwab for aggregation and have 30+ accounts linked. It works fine if you just want to see balances, your net worth, and positions for investment accounts. You can use the Portfolio Checkup Tool to run portfolio reports on your Schwab plus non-Schwab investment accounts. Also, the linked accounts flow through to your financial plan at Schwab, which is primarily what I use the aggregator for.

I was a devout Mint user for 10+ years, and I'm currently looking for a replacement for that. Schwab is nice if all you need is aggregation of balances and for running holistic portfolio reports and financial planning. But Mint was good at the micro-budgeting level--like aggregating transactions, too, and I used Mint's budgets and goals tools, so that's what I'm looking for. No brokerage firm is going to have the level of detail Mint had, since that's a full-time business keeping up with all the software issues for customers (and it doesn't make Schwab or any brokerage firm any money), so I imagine this needs to be a standalone budgeting site that's meant for this like Mint was.

Empower was also mentioned but I won't add yet another financial website if Schwab offers the same service.

 

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Again, Not Ready For Prime Time
Audience: Extended Family Members

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Brief Reminder 

• NOTE: content and typographical errors may increase due to a number of factors. I correct them when I find them. But if something seems wrong or doesn't make sense, it's likely to be a typographical error as anything else. (Updated: September 28, 2024).
  
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