Since its debut in 1982, Excel has been a wildly popular way for people to track assets and manage their financials. Sort of a personal finance tool for beginners. Google Sheets albeit being simpler than Excel has the advantage of ubiquity, as almost everyone has a Google account, and granular sharing features to allow others access the information.
Excel gets geeky as you go
On the surface, Excel or Google Sheets seems like a pretty simple program without much of a learning curve. You can organize information into columns and rows and see information in a simple, easy-to-understand format. It can also handle varied types of assets. But in order to get the most out of Excel, you have to go beyond the basics.
Excel has college-level classes and numerous online forums to help people learn how best to manipulate spreadsheets.
In order to make the best use of Excel or Google Sheets as a monthly financial planner, you need to learn how to use formulas. Even when you’ve mastered the regular formulas, you will still run into problems when you need to update your asset values automatically. You’ll have to manually fetch the information from the internet and write complex formulas to calculate and to update the asset values. There is no simple way to do this.
Kubera is as familiar as Excel
but is designed for Portfolio Tracking
Even if you are tech savvy, there can be a learning curve when it comes to mastering new personal financial planning software. But if you’ve been using a spreadsheet, you’ll feel right at home with Kubera. Kubera has all the benefits of a spreadsheet. Easily add assets by just adding a new row. But unlike Excel you can connect the rows to a bank, brokerage account or a live data feed to fetch the latest values of the assets automatically.
- Connect your online brokerage accounts, or add stock tickers to track their value in real-time. We support all major stock exchanges in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Asia, Australia and NZ.
- Get latest balances from all major crypto wallets and exchange accounts, or simply add the coins to track the value of your crypto portfolio in your native currency.
- Connects to over 20,000 banks worldwide. Kubera uses industry-leading account aggregation technology to give you reliable connectivity to thousands of online banks around the world. Here's the list.
- Track the value of your homes with real-time market data from Zillow (US only).
- Track the real-time value of your cars, trucks, and automobiles.
- Track the estimated market value of the web domain names you own.
- Supports all major currencies. See portfolio in your preferred currency. Enter asset values in any currency and it instantly converts to your preferred portfolio currency using latest exchange rates.
Store related documents
When your data is in one place and your related documents are in another, it creates another step to managing your financial affairs. While you can technically upload your documents to Google Drive (or Dropbox) and create a reference system in your sheet, if the person who needs to access it isn’t particularly tech savvy, they may not be able to access them. In Kubera you can keep notes and upload documents against every asset, debt and insurance information you have entered. It also has a Safe Deposit Box section, where you can upload and store other important documents like your will, power of attorney, photos ID’s, tax returns, Travel documents, rare photos etc. Everything is in one place. No passwords please.
Share, but not yet!
One of the aspects of putting your financial affairs in order is making sure your family can access the information they would need if you were to be incapacitated or pass away. And for a variety of reasons, you only want them to have that information when they need it. Usually tools with great sharing features like Google Sheets allow you to enter information and instantly share it with someone. But there is a good chance that your family may not remember it when the time comes well into the future. Also you may not want your family or friends to have access to this information right away as you don't want to be judged or get unsolicited financial advice. There is also a lot of stigma around wealth so you may prefer not to disclose the level of your wealth during your lifetime.
Kubera has a unique sharing feature that ensures safe transfer of your information to your loved ones if something unexpected happens to you. As a user of Kubera, you can nominate a contact as your Beneficiary. Kubera has a “life beat” check. If you’re inactive for a certain number of days and don’t respond to Kubera’s attempt to reach you, a mail with all your information in downloadable format will be sent to the Beneficiary. A fallback contact (Trusted Angel), who you trust to help out in difficult times, can also be optionally nominated to receive this mail, in case the Beneficiary fails to respond even after multiple reminders.
Summary
If all you need is a simple way to track what’s in your bank accounts and 401(K), Excel is probably adequate. But if you have more types of assets across many destinations and want to track their values regularly, Kubera is the best solution.
Kubera helps you organize all your wealth in one place and keep regular track of your net worth. It also ensures safe transfer of this information to your beneficiary.
Sounds interesting? Please Sign Up and take the free trial.
