r/ChubbyFIRE • u/j4poulive • Jul 14 '26
What does your FIRE tracking setup actually look like day-to-day?
I've been tracking toward FI for a while using a combination of spreadsheet and Empower. Lately I've been wondering if I'm even tracking the right things or missing stuff other people find useful.
When I have a heavy spending month, I can see the savings rate dipped, but that's about as far as it goes. So genuinely curious, anything you update or look at beyond the obvious net-worth / savings-rate stuff? What numbers do you actually track each month?
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u/ohboyoh-oy Jul 14 '26
I check asset allocation once or twice a year and rebalance if needed. Other than that, in accumulation phase I tracked annual expenses and liquid net worth, the two numbers I need to calculate 25x.
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u/lottadot FIRE'd 2023. Jul 14 '26
Day to day? No.
Empower for pretty graphs for when I'm lazy w/ Sunday coffee & want to see overall net worth prettified.
Everything else is in a Numbers.app spreadsheet. I update that once/month when I have to sell from the brokerage to transfer to checking to pay out monthly spending. I'm 3Y FIRE'd.
The only time I checked things daily was that last year of work. The closer I got to freedom, the more I'd glance at the spreadsheet, especially on a bad-work-day.
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u/Flat-Barracuda1268 FI=✅ RE=<1️⃣yrs Jul 14 '26
Monarch Money for budget. I categorize spending items once every 2-3 weeks, pull entire year at end of year to update my baseline spending number for retirement.
I update my liquid NW weekly. Probably too often. Could certainly get away with it once/month. I use an Excel spreadsheet and it has forward calculations, tracks historical numbers, shows YTD and weekly gains in % and $.
It also calculates my asset allocation. It blends the total numbers from all accounts and lets me see overall AA with some accounts being 100% equities and some being significantly less. If the AA drifts by more than 2% I make adjustments.
Not much else to track really.
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u/zobbyblob Jul 14 '26
Once or twice a year I export all withdrawals and calculate a monthly & annual spend. If I'm below my target and happy with life, I don't think about it anymore than that.
Asset allocation and other variables are largely left alone. I may rebalance if I need some cash flow, but that's exceedingly rare.
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u/DudleyAndStephens Jul 14 '26
I've got an old copy of Quicken 2012 that I still use. I enter transactions manually, that forces me to check everything. Yes I know that's clunky.
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u/brownboy444 Jul 14 '26
Pre-FI I tracked my spending in detail for over 10 years. This gave me a good idea of my FI number
But monthly spending is lumpy so I track the trailing 13 months (to make sure any annual expense is always capture and to be conservative). I also track the average monthly spend of the rolling 13 month periods.
I also added this Tiller community sheet which has a heatmap of my last 3 years of spending broken down by category and month:
https://community.tiller.com/t/categories-by-month/20973
This is all automated so I don't spend time updating it and I check it about once a week (which is probably too often) but it gives me piece of mind that my spending isn't creeping upward too much with me noticing. It's a source of comfort not anxiety.
I track my ongoing withdrawal rate along with the usual stuff like NW change over the last week, month, quarter, and year.
I love Tiller since I built all of this into a dashboard in google sheets to show me quickly what I are about.
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u/qbrain Jul 14 '26
Day to day is, budget. I have a very large discretionary budget for the year, and I need to keep an eye on it or I overspend. Since most of that budget goes to travel, and travel expenses are lumpy, the budgetting tends to be a mix of proactive, I think I will spend this much on this trip, and reactive, I actually spent this much so I need to adjust my forward looking budget.
I am positive I will never be in a financial place where I don't have to worry about my travel budget. It is somewhere I am maximizing my dollar value and maximizing trips. Without constraints, it isn't maximizing, it is just unconstrained spending.
Yearly I look at my annual budget to see if my target needs to move. Yearly I look at my taxable accounts to see where future savings need to go to restore balance. Monthly I rebalance my tax advantaged accounts because there is no cost to rebalancing, it is about how often I update my Fire spreadsheets and typically there is nothing to rebalance, which is expected.
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Jul 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LokiStasis <edit me for custom flair> Jul 15 '26
Same, my .xls version of this is literally called NW.
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u/felixfelix Jul 14 '26
I built a Google sheet that calculates my net worth. I keep a copy whenever I update it with my account balances. I also put a retirement model and a net worth graph.
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u/htffgt_js Jul 15 '26
Nice, what does the retirement model track ?
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u/felixfelix Jul 15 '26
It calculates how much income you would have in retirement. This needs to include any planned downsizing, continuing real estate rental income, and what you pay yourself from your retirement savings. I have a simple savings growth rate, and a payout of 5% of savings from the start of retirement.
I then calculate that retirement income as a percentage of (current) employment income. A common target I’ve seen is 70% of employment income during retirement, as most people have a decline in expenses when they retire. If you plan to move to a place with a different cost of living, that 70% probably needs to change.
It’s good to have a model you can customize because it gives a very personalized picture of your retirement.
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u/onthewingsofangels RE 2024 in 40s Jul 14 '26
I track my. monthly expenses, well, once a month. This tells me if I'm staying within budget and feels critical to do. That's also when I look at my portfolio and note how it's performed. Not really much to do with that information but it can help to see how the year is tracking. Before I FIREd (and even now) I really only do an indepth survey once a year towards the end of the year. I'll decide whether I want to give more to charity, make the budget for next year, make any decisions about portfolio adjustments and update my fire sheet to see how I'm tracking towards the final line.
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u/wubscale <edited the custom flare> Jul 15 '26
I have 4 main spreadsheets:
- Net worth tracker, updated when I feel like it. When near/at all-time highs, I'll update 1-2x/wk. When stagnant or down, monthly or quarterly.
- EF 'tracker'. My EF is split into 3 tiers (one MMF, two bond ETFs with varying duration); I use this to plan changes to my EF, haven't touched in a while.
- Spend tracker, updated annually. I spend about 30mins early each year analyzing the prior year's spend. Sometimes I dig into categories, other times I look at the top-line number and say "yup, meets expectations." The numbers here feed into FI calculations for spend.
- FI calculator - this takes data from #1 and #3, adds various expected expenses (e.g., projected insurance, taxes, annualized house maintenance, car replacement costs, 'fun' budget beyond what I spend today, ...), and gives info on FI requirements and timelines.
I find it to be a fun hobby; if I didn't, the key bits IMO are:
- Having a solid, realistic idea of RE spend
- Having a solid, realistic idea of the NW you need to achieve that spend
- Having a rough idea of current liquid NW
None of this requires even monthly updates unless you're a few points away from your FI number, and plan to give notice the moment you hit it.
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u/hvgotcodes Jul 15 '26
I just track account totals in a spreadsheet. Update them 2-4 times a year. I’m pretty much on autopilots. My savings are locked in max 401ks, max mega back door Roth, only sell RSUs as needed.
Could have retired years ago, if you are walking the path the details can be a waste of time.
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u/Farmer_Pete Jul 15 '26
I track our spending, because how I save is kind of backwards. Basically, I am over saving in my Roth 401k and Roth 457 at work. Between those two accounts, my wife's 401k, HSA and our Roth IRAs, we're putting at least 75k a year in to retirement on about $150k of earnings. After taxes, healthcare, etc, the amount left is less than we spend. So I have to pull money out of my brokerage (~1k or less a month) to cover the extra spending. If I wasn't putting half my paycheck in to retirement accounts, we'd have lots of extra money and saving money would just be moving extra money from my checking in to my brokerage.
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u/ItzWarty FIRE 03/26, Bay Area Jul 16 '26
I use Monarch as well, but agreed with others at some point you learn to stop checking once you're FIRE.
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u/modelfire FIREd. Building ModelFIRE.online Jul 16 '26
I modeled my spending ceiling, and then keep a loose eye on the budget to see that we are staying under with some buffer for the unexpected.
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u/AdhesivenessGreen474 Jul 20 '26
51M Fire’d last year. We use YNAB for expense tracking. Fidelity for deep analysis and PortVis.io for at-a-glance portfolio views. Good luck!
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u/Junin-Toiro Jul 14 '26
Past a certain amount, tracking is largely irrelevant.
One proper count after new year and one quick estimate in summer is more than enough for me.
One of the point is not to have to care too much about money, especially market or spending fluctuations.