{"id":587,"date":"2011-03-28T17:31:59","date_gmt":"2011-03-29T00:31:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.knuetter.com\/christian\/?p=587"},"modified":"2011-03-28T17:31:59","modified_gmt":"2011-03-29T00:31:59","slug":"what-poor-returns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.knuetter.com\/christian\/2011\/03\/28\/what-poor-returns\/","title":{"rendered":"what poor returns!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a long-time user of Quicken software to track my accounts.\u00a0 As a former employee of Intuit, I have always been a fan of their mission to simplify people’s financial lives.\u00a0 But this mission hasn’t always translated into good product experiences.<\/p>\n

So a couple of years ago I gave Mint a try and was very happy with their service.\u00a0 It was (and still is) free and it offers a good view into the state of your accounts.<\/p>\n

At least, it used to.<\/p>\n

For some reason, investments have always been difficult to track. To my knowledge, there are no good tools that are reasonably priced that allow you to track the performance of your investments.\u00a0 The biggest problem seems to be separating out initial investments from dividend or other returns.\u00a0 Inevitably these get counted as additional purchases instead of reinvestments.\u00a0 Mint suffered from the same algorithmic problems but I was willing to live with them.<\/p>\n

But now it’s gotten so much worse.\u00a0 I’m not sure if Mint is not being well tended to by it’s new parent company or if this is just some strange anomaly with my account .. Here’s a snapshot of my latest investment report from Mint<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To me, the initially alarming aspect was the RED chart.\u00a0 This is indicating by how much my investments are underperforming against the S&P 500.\u00a0 This chart showing that I’ve had essentially zero growth in the last 6 months.\u00a0 That’s disappointing (especially since I have a rather large portion of my accounts in an S&P 500 index fund.\u00a0 It’s also not accurate.\u00a0 A manual calculation shows that I’m doing relatively well against said index.<\/p>\n

But perhaps worse than not reporting on the returns of my investments correctly, there’s something else horribly wrong with this report.\u00a0 Horribly wrong.\u00a0 (Unfortunately, for me).\u00a0 And that would be, the value of my investments.\u00a0 When I look at my account balances (as reported in Mint), my actual investment balance is somewhere oh .. let’s just say, WELL South of the number that is reported in this snapshot.\u00a0 Where the hell did this number come from?\u00a0 If only Mint operated as a bank and I could make a hasty withdraw..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a long-time user of Quicken software to track my accounts.\u00a0 As a former employee of Intuit, I have always been a fan of their mission to simplify people’s financial lives.\u00a0 But this mission hasn’t always translated into good product experiences. So a couple of years ago I gave Mint a try and was … <\/p>\n

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