What does that $45K net savings (after Roth contributions) tell me? First, it tells me the Passive Money Tracking Experiment was mostly a failure.

Quicken’s annual Cash Flow report, which I trust since I control the input My Saving’s Grace As a result, I trust this number, as I know exactly what data it represents. On the plus side everything in Quicken is modifiable, so the user gets to determine what is, or isn’t, included in the report. This total is way short of my $66.5K goal whose importance I chronicled in Track Your Money Part 3. After subtracting our $11K of Roth, annual net cash savings fell to approximately $45K. After reconstructing the year, the “Cash Flow” report shows that my family’s total net savings for 2017 (excluding investment income) was approximately $56K. As a result, I don’t trust this number any more than the previous one. However, I still cannot verify exactly how Mint determines expenses and income for this report. Obviously, I had approximately $1K of transactions mislabeled in my previous report. After spending a few days double checking entries, modifying several transaction labels, and re-displaying reports Mint now shows an annual net savings of $69.5K. The program, as far I could tell, didn’t allow for that determination. However, I didn’t trust that number due to my inability to verify whether or not Mint accounted for our annual Roth IRA transfer. To refresh everyone’s memory, when I initially ran Grumpus Familias’s net savings for 2017 through Mint as part of my annual end of year fiscal review, it reported we saved $70.5K. The now infamous Net Income Over Time report display Doing so allowed me to total my net savings for the year in Quicken and verify if I made any mistakes with my Mint calculations. I spent several days prior to writing this article improving the fidelity of my data in my account. I also rebuilt my entire 2017 financial year in Quicken. This is especially crucial considering the importance I place on tracking money, to begin with. However, much like Darrow Kirkpatrick did with retirement calculators, I believe it’s important to understand the pluses and minuses associated with popular money tracking software. Apologies to those of you who don’t enjoy these articles as much as some of my others. As a result of the problems identified in my previous article with ’s annual “Net Savings Over Time” report, I decided to nerd out on money tracking again.

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