In short
Mindy Jensen and co-host Scott Trench demonstrate how to set up and use Monarch Money to track spending, budget categories, and an up-to-date net worth dashboard (including investments, real estate, and liabilities). They also discuss how often to check net worth and how to avoid unhealthy “relentless checking.”
Guests
No guests. Hosts are Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench (BiggerPocketsMoney co-hosts).
Guest backgrounds
Mindy Jensen is the podcast host and personally uses Monarch as her “command center” for net worth, spending, and budgeting. Scott Trench is the co-host who emphasizes tracking cash, debts/liabilities, and using automation; he also references using other tools (e.g., Empower) and cube money for budget compliance.
Key claims
Monarch consolidates accounts via real-time linking; AI auto-categorizes transactions (not perfect); monthly checking is sufficient for index-fund investors; adding assets/liabilities (Zillow estimates, manual values, mortgages) changes net worth accuracy.
Notable examples
Connecting Chase/Wells Fargo personal vs business accounts; excluding tax set-aside cash; tagging examples like Amazon stock vs groceries; budget walkthrough (shopping, entertainment tickets, parking/tolls); adding a primary home via manual value and a mortgage liability (~$300k).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Importance of Financial Tracking
0:00 to 0:45
Understand why tracking your finances is essential for financial success.
“When you're ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork.”
The Importance of Financial Tracking
3:03 to 4:36
Understand why tracking your finances is essential for financial success.
“And with me, as always, is my tracking where his money is going co-host, Scott Trench.”
Frequency of Tracking Your Net Worth
4:36 to 5:15
Explore how often you should check on your net worth and expenses.
“Are these updating reasonably frequently?”
Connecting Your Financial Data
5:15 to 6:36
Learn how to securely connect your bank and credit accounts to Monarch.
“You cannot play the game of finance if you can't keep score.”
Setting Up Monarch Money Live
6:36 to 8:01
Watch a step-by-step walkthrough of setting up a Monarch Money account.
“Now, every once in a while, I will find myself tracking something on a regular basis and just kind of looking at like, I'm not taking any action to improve this.”
Understanding Your Financial Dashboard
8:01 to 9:14
Get insights on how to navigate and use the Monarch dashboard effectively.
“from checking in as frequently as you do, what's the longest, the widest span that you would suggest somebody check in on their net worth?”
Exploring Spending and Cash Flow
9:14 to 14:00
Discover how to analyze spending habits and cash flow using Monarch.
“It says up here, get 30 % off your first year with code WELCOME.”
Exploring the Power of Monarch Money
14:00 to 18:00
Learn how to connect and analyze your financial accounts using Monarch Money.
“All right, let's take that into account and jump back in.”
Tracking Spending with AI
18:00 to 28:00
Discover how AI technology can help categorize and track your expenses effectively.
“This gets especially confusing if and when there are business transfers for investments or when I'm paying for like legal or tax planning advice or whatever, there seems to be a challenge with those.”
Tracking Net Worth in Real Time
29:53 to 32:38
Mindy updates her financial accounts to reflect her current net worth.
“Let's update the conversation starting right now in real time.”
Show all 16 chapters
Adding Real Estate Values
32:39 to 33:55
Mindy adds her properties and real estate values to her net worth tracker.
“That's super powerful for a lot of this.”
Inputting Mortgages and Liabilities
33:56 to 36:23
Discussion on how to accurately input mortgages and other liabilities into Monarch.
“But this is kind of cool because it uses this estimate to update the value of your property in real time.”
Maintaining Financial Accounts
36:24 to 37:50
Tips on how to regularly maintain and update financial accounts for accuracy.
“I know that there are some accounts that I am missing here.”
Evaluating Monarch's Features
37:51 to 40:54
Exploring the features of Monarch and its effectiveness for diverse financial situations.
“fiddling with your old HSA or 401k or whatever.”
Invitation for Viewer Feedback
40:55 to 42:02
Mindy and Scott encourage listeners to share their experiences with Monarch.
“Well, it was fun to set this up with you today, Mindy.”
Discussion on Monarch Money Features
42:02 to 43:00
Learn about the features and benefits of Monarch Money.
“And what tabs along the side am I missing that I need to go back and dive into a little bit more?”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Mindy Jensen:When you're ready to start your business, Northwest Registered Agent helps you do more than just file paperwork. You get all the tools to build a real business identity from day one. A business address, website, phone number, operating agreement, free guides, and more at no extra cost. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1 ,500 corporate guides. These are real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way.
0:33Mindy Jensen:With Northwest, your business is set up to stand on its own from day one. That means your home address, personal email and phone number stay private. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com slash money free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash moneyfree. I'm skeptical of a lot of financial products, but life insurance isn't one of them, at least not term life. For the vast majority of you listening, term life is simply the right answer.
1:09And the smartest way to buy it isn't one big policy, it's a ladder. Your need for coverage isn't flat. It declines over time. You've got a 30-year mortgage, a couple of young kids, maybe a spouse mid-career. In 15 years, the mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched. So instead of buying one giant 30-year policy you'll overpay for, you stack a few, say a 10-year, a 20-year, and a 30-year layer. So your total coverage steps down as your actual obligations step down. You only pay for what you actually need when you need it. Ethos is a platform that helps you find life insurance 100 % online.
1:38You can get a quote in seconds and apply in minutes. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few health questions online. You can get up to 3 million in coverage. Some policies are as low as$30 a month. That makes building a ladder genuinely fast. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash bpmoney. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash bpmoney. Application times may vary and rates may vary. You know that feeling you get when checking your finances means logging into five different apps? That's why I use Monarch. Setup takes about 10 minutes. You can link your accounts and everything you own and owe lands in one clean dashboard.
2:12Banking, cards, investments, even keeping track of recurring charges. After that, you can stay on top of your money in just minutes, not hours per month. Monarch saves you time and actually helps you use it wisely. Use the code pockets at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at monarch.com with the code pockets.
2:34Mindy Jensen:What if I told you one of the biggest obstacles to fire isn't your income or expenses? It's actually knowing where your money's going. Today, I'm going to walk you through setting up a Monarch Money account live. We talk about it all the time on the podcast, but we love this tool. And if you're worried that it sounds too complicated, we're going to break it all down today.
2:59Mindy Jensen:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen. And with me, as always, is my tracking where his money is going co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy. Always great to be on top of the latest trends with you here at BiggerPocketsMoney. All right. You said it, Mindy. We really love this tool. This is what I use to personally track and manage my finances, track my net worth, track my spending, and build the basic outline of a budget. Actually, it's another tool to adhere to my budget, which we'll talk about another time. But Monarch is the beating heart of how I track my personal finances.
3:33And I think it sounds annoying to have another thing to use potentially, but Monarch money really is this command center for your finances. It takes a lot of guesswork out of the process for you. I will also say that we have been trying for years to get Monarch to sponsor BiggerPockets money. We are working towards a future where we have a handful of really close-knit sponsors. And you guessed it, we finally have got a partnership with Monarch. They didn't ask for this episode. We're giving it to them as part of a broader campaign sponsoring the show, but we just love the product so much, We thought we'd use it.
4:06We do have a discount for members that'll be following the entire video on the top right corner of your screen right there. If you want to check it out, it's like a hundred bucks a year for this tool. It's not a break the bank. And I believe it saves me many, many, many, many, many, many times that amount in terms of time and then accuracy and understanding my financial position.
4:25Mindy Jensen:Scott, what are some of the things that you feel are really important to be tracking when someone's looking at their net worth? I think it's everything, right? And it's Do you have an understanding of where all your cash is? Do you have an understanding of where your debts are, what liabilities you have? Are these updating reasonably frequently? You can do this in a spreadsheet. All the stuff we're going to do today and talk about can be done in a spreadsheet or done on a piece of paper even. It's just the automation is so important at this point. There are so many transactions, little transactions that hit my credit cards or my bank account or changes in investments as money is added on a regular basis.
5:01that every day the market moves in my portfolio, it ticks up or down. And just being able to look at those and just refresh things on an instantaneous basis is really important. It doesn't have to be every day. It doesn't have to be every month. It doesn't have to be every quarter, but at some cadence, you gotta be checking these numbers. You cannot play the game of finance if you can't keep score. And while a spreadsheet's good, I think the new technology, and there are several apps out there, like Empower, like Personal Capital, like Monarch Money, that can solve this problem. Monarch just happens to be our favorite.
5:29it.
5:29Mindy Jensen:And Scott, you said you didn't want to do this by hand every single day? Nope. I certainly do not want to do this by hand every single day. And I certainly like to kind of be able to check it. Yeah. And you said something I thought was interesting, Scott. You said, whether you check it every day, every quarter, every month, what do you think is a good cadence to check it? Because you get kind of obsessed, not you specifically, you like formally get kind of obsessed when you first start this. And you're like, oh, I got to check it like every single day. When I first set up that Frankonomics portfolio with Frank Vasquez a couple of weeks ago, I was checking it multiple times a day.
6:03Mindy Jensen:And I've stopped. I check it far less frequently now. But I'm wondering if when you're first starting checking your net worth, if it's detrimental to be checking every single minute, every single day, is it better to check once a week or once a month? What are your thoughts on that? I check it every day. I check it every day. I check my, my, I check my fitness every day. I'm either tracking calories or weighing myself or making sure I'm doing some kind of workout. Um, I try to track the things that are important to me, like, like my, my marriage and, and, you know, how I'm spending time with my kids.
6:37So I'm, I'm a tracker in a lot of ways. I see no problem in tracking every day. Now, every once in a while, I will find myself tracking something on a regular basis and just kind of looking at like, I'm not taking any action to improve this. So there's no surprise when nothing changes or it gets worse on there. So I think it's really unhealthy to check something without a plan in place, without something that could be moving to like, Hey, I have a hypothesis. If I do this, this number will move up into the right or improve in some way. If there's no activity that could possibly be leading to the change, then just relentless checking it, I think is very unhealthy.
7:10But I think that checking the numbers on a frequent basis is absolutely vital. Can you imagine running a business without checking the numbers every week? I mean, it's just, preposterous. So your net worth is bigger than many businesses for many people listening to this.
7:23Mindy Jensen:Okay, but I'm going to push back a little bit. You said, can you imagine not checking in on your business? Running a business, you checking in, you can see, oh, trends are starting to go this way. I can make a change and it will change. In your net worth, if you are invested in index funds, which is what the majority of everybody is suggesting now, invest in index funds, you checking in doesn't have any bearing on the results. So I can see somebody getting a little nervous, getting a little anxious during a bit of a downswing and checking in obsessively would be detrimental. So for somebody who might not be benefiting from checking in as frequently as you do, what's the longest, the widest span that you would suggest somebody check in on their net worth?
8:09I think you should check in every month. And look, should you be relentlessly updating the portfolio value of your all index fund stock portfolio on a daily basis? No, that's probably very unhealthy. I completely agree. But should you be checking in on what your spending looks like month to date? If you check in that every day, again, like if you're spending 30 minutes doing this, that's totally unreasonable. But if you're just swiping the app to refresh and saying, oh, my goal was$7 ,000 in spending this month and it's halfway through the month and I'm at$4 ,000. Like that's not unhealthy. That's helpful.
8:39That allows you to change behavior and course correct for the rest of the month.
8:42Mindy Jensen:Okay. I think that's a great answer, Scott. When you said net worth, I was just thinking stocks and investments. But yeah, your expenses are going to contribute greatly to your net worth. That's a great reminder. How often do you check it, Mindy? My net worth, I check almost never. How often does Carl check it? I was going to say I'm balanced out by Carl who checks it every single day. I love it. Well, should we get into it? Let's actually go and set this thing up. And let's preview it. How much does Monarch cost? Monarch? Well, Scott, let's go in there and see. I am going to share my screen. I am on the Monarch Money website.
9:18Mindy Jensen:It says up here, get 30 % off your first year with code WELCOME. I am going to sign up with code POCKETS, P-O-C-K-E-T-S, and that will get me 50 % off. And that's good for everybody who's listening to this podcast today. Yeah, I think it's like$100 a year. So it's like$50 for the first year if you use the code POCKETS when you sign up. All right, let's begin by connecting the account where most of your spending happens. The first thing that Monarch is going to do as you sign up is they're going to have you connect an account because the tool is useless. It's not it's not there's no value. If you're if you're not willing to share the data from your credit card statement, your bank accounts or your investment portfolio with Monarch, then the entire premise is shot.
9:58It doesn't work. It doesn't like the whole point is this is this connects in real time with all of these financial institutions. So you have to get over this fear that a lot of people have of sharing that data. And if you can't, then use a spreadsheet, right? Do not use this app if you can't get over that fear. You know, I will say that Mindy and I have, you know, fairly large numbers in our personal portfolios, and we have no problem sharing this data in real time with these aggregators. the advantages of having it all clearly in place and being able to spot these things is so huge. And there's also additional safety that I view in sharing these numbers.
10:30Yes, there's risk always in sharing any data around there. But some of the safety that I perceive is when I check my statement, right, I'm rolling this or updating it on a regular basis. And if there's a big spike or drop, I know it's instantaneously. The app also lets me know from an alerts perspective, if there is like a finance charge or something like that in there. So I can see these things in more real time. And that offers protection that you don't get if you do not share the data. So there's only trade-offs in this world. There's no perfectly free thing. But by and large, I think the benefits of sharing my data with Monarch far, far, far, far, far outweigh the risks.
11:06And I think a million people agree with me on that. So if you're truly absurdly wealthy, maybe you have a different view on that. But I think that for most people with less than$50 million in net worth, this is probably a good tool.
11:20Mindy Jensen:I have less than$50 million in net worth, Scott. So you are correct. So Plaid is asking me to log into Chase on my phone. So hang on a second. Let me do that. All right. So this popped up on my computer and it is actually, it's asking me four different steps. What accounts of mine at my bank do I wish to connect with? I checked all of my credit cards and my bank, my actual bank account. And this is important because I have, for example, I bank with Wells Fargo and I have accounts that are personal and accounts that are business. And I choose to not share my business accounts with Monarch because I don't include those in my personal net worth statement.
12:06Those are cash. Presumably any cash in the business is required to run the business. And so I leave that cash in there and don't consider it my property until I distribute it from the business to myself.
12:18Mindy Jensen:That is a great way to keep everything separate, Scott. I like that a lot. I think we talked to a lot of people who maybe don't keep everything so separate. And I like keeping things separate too. And another one I exclude is I have an account that I set aside cash that I believe is a conservative estimate of what I'll need to pay it come tax time. And so I'll leave that and exclude that from my personal net worth statement as well. That's not mine. That's the government's money. I'm just holding it for them and receiving interest. Okay, I have connected my bank and now I'm going to hit skip for now.
12:50Mindy Jensen:And let's see, connect your bank and credit cards. Okay, I just did that. Oh, now I have to connect my credit cards. Okay, so I logged into my credit card and Monarch asks if I can connect the accounts. Yes, please, connect everything. Which do you want? I want them all. And authorize. So when you set up your account at first, you are going to have to connect all of your accounts. I think that, like you said, Scott, there's almost no point in doing this if you're not going to connect your account so you can have a holistic view of everything that's going on. I even go further and I'll say that it's just not, it's not even that helpful to connect some of your accounts.
13:33It's just the whole point of this is to have a command center that has everything beating into it, all of your expenses, all of your, all of your investments. that you want to track here because they're all interconnected and interflowing into one financial picture.
13:47Mindy Jensen:We are going to take a quick ad break to hear from our show sponsors. But when we're back, we'll break down how you can set budget parameters to help fast track your FI path.
14:02All right, let's take that into account and jump back in. Once everything's connected, you'll see something like this dashboard here at the outset.
14:12Mindy Jensen:I need to connect more things. I don't have my investments connected here, my investment accounts. Are all your spending accounts connected at this point? I believe so. This is what's so powerful about this is we can already see just with the spending accounts, hey, here's how things are tracking this month versus last month, which I think is super powerful in terms of spending your general household. So it's a very powerful tool. You can see what's going on here. Mindy is like, I spend so much money. And yet Mindy, when we see when we show your net worth, it's like this is such a small percentage of your net worth.
14:44It's such a responsible level of spending for someone in your your position here. And you're going to be like, oh, I spent so much on there. I'll tell you this. I spend more than that right now in my life. Look on the cash flow tab. I think this is one of the thing that's super awesome about this is, yeah, you can see this cash flow and it says we haven't hooked up your income yet to the story, but you can see from a spending perspective, the AI is pretty good. Scroll down the page a little bit. You can see it automatically tagged a bunch of these categories for expenses. So you don't have to.
15:15Let's go see how accurate they were. Let's go to let's click on the shopping tab because there's not perfect. The AI is not perfect. You will have to change some things. But this says, hey, there's some Amazon orders. Guitarver some. What is that?
15:25Mindy Jensen:Carl bought some guitar parts. So that's shopping. Yes, that's an accurate. That's an accurate. I have Amazon stock in my portfolio. I think a lot of people's position might look like this, right? And so you can, like sometimes, you know, if we order groceries or whatever, it'll still show from Amazon if we order from Whole Foods for delivery every once in a while. But so you can go and tag any one of these items here, but it'll auto populate them. Let's go to another category and see how the AI did. Let's go back to medical. Let's see what we've got. Oh, yeah. Well, that's pretty accurate. Anthem is my health insurance premiums.
15:58Mindy Jensen:and Cloud Medical is my concierge medical service. Entertainment and recreation. Let's see what they see. The Carnival, yes. Recreation.gov,$2. Well, okay. I'm glad they got that one right. That government's a real party. Red Rocks, TickPicks. We bought tickets to something I can't remember. Oh, the Beach Boys. We just went and saw the Beach Boys. Spotify. So this all looks good. Restaurants and bars. That's a restaurant. Those are all restaurants. Pay Ricks. Is that a restaurant? Oh, Sweet Cow. Yep, that's the ice cream place in our town. Yep, that's all restaurants and bars. You can see how if you were to swipe this on a regular basis every day, and then you go up to the top, like you log into the app, and this is also a great phone app, by the way, but if you go to the very top of this page here, and you go back to cash flow, you can see, hey, if that spikes up, or better yet, even on the dashboard, you go to the dashboard real quick, and you're like, oh, I had a huge leap here from day 22 to 24.
17:02I should probably take a look at that. Did I spend something big there? Do I know what that was? What was going on with that? Then we know we've got a problem. That's the value of swiping this thing on a regular basis. Just taking a quick look. I mean, it literally takes less than 10 seconds once you swipe it, or maybe admit me 60 seconds if we're being realistic about loading and all that kind of stuff. That's the power of looking at the thing every day, not obsessing over your stock market balance. And you can say, oh, I'm surprised by this expense or I'm not, or I really don't like that number.
17:32Like Mindy's response there. That's how I feel some months.
17:35Mindy Jensen:How did I spend$3 ,000 in one day? That's why this tool is so powerful. And you can see Mindy didn't have to tag all our expenses and categorize them and tabulate them. It did it for her. And if you think those are reasonable, reasonable outputs, that's the power of the increasing AI. Now, it's not perfect. and I do have to go back over the course of the year and look at all the different categories and look through my transactions. Every once in a while, I'll mischaracterize a transaction. This gets especially confusing if and when there are business transfers for investments or when I'm paying for like legal or tax planning advice or whatever, there seems to be a challenge with those.
18:14Another big expense for me is I pay my own taxes. So it considers those an expense and I don't really like to think about them that way. It's not really like a spending category for me. It's not perfect, but you can see it's pretty good at what it does.
Read the full transcript
18:25Mindy Jensen:Yeah. And you know what, Scott? A couple of years ago, I tracked my spending with a Google form on my phone that went into a Google sheet that showed me where all my spending was. And I thought that was great for tracking in real time. But it's also really kind of time consuming. Every time you're making a purchase, you have to remember to put it in there. So what I like about Monarch is that it's not quite real time, especially if you're only checking it once a month, but it's real time enough that you can go in here and say, oh my goodness, on day 24, you're like, what's this big jump here? I mean, even back here on day 23, I doubled.
19:04Mindy Jensen:Okay, that's not really such a good example. But last month on day 24, I spent$3 ,000. So that's something, if I wasn't aware of that, that's something that I can use to keep track of potential fraud, or I can use to keep my husband on board and say, hey, what are we swiping$3 ,000 for? I'm sure it was an actual thing we talked about, but not everybody is as communicative with their spouse about money as my husband and I are. So this is a pretty powerful tool. Let's go to budget real quick. I want to show that one off real quick. We got to all say a big thank you to Mindy because she's being breathtakingly transparent with her finances on this particular show.
19:43Something that I would not feel this comfortable with. So thank you, Mindy, for doing this.
19:47Mindy Jensen:Oh, sure. Why do I have$120 in income? Mindy, it looks like you spend$10 ,000 to$12 ,000 a month was what I saw on the first slide in there, or at least$10 ,000 to$12 ,000 last month. So let's say you have$12 ,000 to spend. That is a good point. Okay, now I can continue. I just want to call it one thing, Mindy, before we go on this, could you go back one, two more here? You can also do this other type, category budget, which is another way of kind of going about it here. This is how I do it on there, which I think is a little easier for me is it just groups all the expenses into these buckets.
20:21And then I just go through and put them in. This helps me a little bit more because I know, oh, I spent this much in food and dining this month.
20:27Mindy Jensen:You know what? I like this better. And Anne, did you notice it saved all of the inputs and just moved them to a different place? I like that. So you can try this version. If you don't like it, you can go try the other version and you don't have to re-enter everything. I'm probably going to do$500 here. Mindy, we've needed a coffee shop weekly. I guess that's a business expense. That's a business expense, Scott. And I separate my business and personal expenses. Thank you very much. You're right, yeah. All right. Fun money. Let's do$250 per month on that. Shopping, apparently that's my big one. So let's do$600 there and look to cut that back.
21:01Oh, Mindy, you're already at like$760 though.
21:03Mindy Jensen:Clothing, Scott. I am currently in the middle of an epic weight loss journey. And clothing is something that I am going to have to swap out for the next few months because nothing fits anymore, which is a good problem. That's awesome. Congratulations. My gym membership. Love to go there. Medical. I think that's going to be about$6.50 a month. Oops. And dentist. Oh, I think that's let's call that$50 a month because I can't remember how much that actually is. Financial fees, cash and ATM. am taxes is not something I am very good at budgeting for and need to get better at business don't need any business here so here we go I still have a lot of money left to budget I would suggest if you're going through this exercise the first time for for folks Mindy you may be different on this but I would suggest you put in two thousand dollars into miscellaneous or one one to two thousand dollars because I find that when I do a grounds bottoms up budget and guess at my numbers my actual spending is at least that much higher in a given month because of all the quirks of life that go in and my lapses as a human being in terms of adhering to certain of those categories that I set for myself.
22:14Mindy Jensen:I have$2 ,600 left to budget. I don't really think I spend$12 ,000 a month on average. So I'm going to keep this as just extra and I'm going to continue. Yeah. Without that big spike last month, that looks pretty close to what you might be spending. Yeah. All right. View my budget. Income, gifts and donations I have to refill out. auto and transport. Oh, it looks like I spent, but I didn't have any money in there for it. Interesting. I like how it's red too. So it tells me you did something wrong or you went over budget. Well, let's click on it. Let's click on it and see the expense there. So let's click on auto and transport and go into there.
22:52So it says Denver public parking. You spent 21 bucks parking at Denver and didn't have that budgeted.
22:57Mindy Jensen:At the airport. I sure did. You know what? That is a good point. Let's go back to the budget. Let's go to. Yeah, you can click on it. Oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah. Auto payment, parking and tolls. So let's do you know what I'm probably going to do about$75 a month in parking and tolls taxis and ride shares. I'm going to do 25 because those are I mean, they're not doing any or I'm doing a ton auto payment. I don't have public transit gas. Oh, I've got two electric vehicles and two gas vehicles. So I'm going to go$50 a month because I don't actually spend that much on the gas. And auto maintenance.
23:32Mindy Jensen:Ooh, I just went way over budget on the auto maintenance. The zero, I just put$3 ,000 into my car, but that's not something that I'm going to have to do. I should, you know what? I should have auto maintenance in here because I have a 1987 and a 2003. I can pretty much guarantee something's going to break. Okay. No budget for home improvement. Did I miss that? Oh, there we go. Wow. This month, that's probably going to be$2 ,000. What did I spend here? Oh,$200. 184, 175 and 172. 200 sounds good. I have most of the supplies already. Knowing you, there is no world in which home improvement ever ends, even after you build a brand new home from scratch with all new materials and finishes.
24:12Mindy Jensen:Wow. That's like, you know me or something, Scott. I think this is good to start. Oh, look, I'm already over budget on this entertainment and recreation. Why? What happened here? Oh, the carnival. Oh, TickPick. Yeah, we've got tickets to the Beach Boys. But I love how easy this is to just click on it and see. Oh, this is sad. No transactions in this period for fun money. Well, I guess I'm going to have to change that. And I've already gone over budget on shopping. Hey, Scott, it's August 12th that we're recording this. And I've gone over budget on my shopping. I need to rein that in, I guess. Show two unbudgeted.
24:50Mindy Jensen:What is that? Or just give yourself more there. That's a great reason to go over budget. Yes. Okay. How about this? 800. Now I'm good again. Because we are just setting this up for funsies, I would be more conscious of what you are actually choosing and changing when you change your budget. Have a reason for it or take it from someplace else. I am just showing you how easy it is to change things on your budget. Show two unbudgeted. Too unbudgeted means I don't have any money in there for child. I don't have childcare expenses and child activities don't start up until next year when Daphne starts playing lacrosse in the spring.
25:25Mindy Jensen:Okay, so I think this is pretty good. I have$1 ,800 left to budget. Scott, would you recommend$0 budgeting? Is that when every dollar is accounted for? Or would you recommend left to budget so you could give yourself some grace in some of these categories? What I think Monarch is really good at is it is a wonderful way to track where you're at and where you've been, right? You can see your net worth journey over time. It's like, think about it as the accounting arm, the historical data set for your financial journey, right? I've been in this for years. I have years worth of financial data. I can see the trend lines and all these different categories of spending and my wealth.
26:04What I don't, what I, what personally, what I don't think it helps me do personally is I don't comply with my budget because of Monarch the same way. I know where my spending is and I can course correct, but I use a different tool called cube money to force myself to stay inside of my budget. That actually funds certain accounts in there. And that is what allows me to really stay on track with my, my spending. This is more of like an accounting item here. So it has some ability to say, here's some reports or goals or investments or whatever. But if I really want to like project out what is a retirement calculator, I'll use a different calculator.
26:41And then I just use this as like, here's where all my money is. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And here's what's invested in. So I can use that as the input source for it. It makes keeping a tabulation on everything very simple, but it's not the tool I use to project the future or to force myself to stay inside these boxes for my budget.
26:55Mindy Jensen:Now that's interesting. So I like to try and stay within my budgeting, my budget categories. I'm going to want to know why I've got$4 here. I'm going to want to check that out. Pets. Oh, I was going to say I don't have a pet, but my daughter, look at this. This is so great. My daughter has a lizard and it's not a dog or a cat walking all over the place. It sits in its little box. And I forgot that I buy it crickets. Every other week I buy$2 worth of crickets. So I'm going to put$10 in here just in case he has a big eating day. I'm not going to change this one. I do want to have the red here. But I love how they keep giving me more things that I forgot I spent money on.
27:38Mindy Jensen:That's the thing. When you're just swiping a card, it kind of doesn't register as much as, oh, look at this. I went through and now I have one red category. It is very powerful just doing that and will help some people for that. But just me personally, I find this is not the tool that actually helps me comply with my spending. But for some people, it may be plenty. When we're back from our final ad break, I will be syncing all of my investment accounts so we can get a clear picture of how to use this tool to track net worth. If you've been putting off life insurance, I get it. The old process was miserable.
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29:52All right. Thanks for sticking with us. Let's update the conversation starting right now in real time. The second really important, powerful component of Monarch is giving you a up-to-date near current picture of your net worth. And so for that, we're going to have to insert a bunch of investment accounts. That includes every 401k, every Roth IRA, if those are in different holdings, any other after-tax brokerage accounts, and then there will be manual accounts. So for me as a real estate investor, I do have to input my properties in there and we'll show that in a second.
30:25Mindy Jensen:This is a pretty good, well, this is a terrible snapshot of my investment holdings because it says I have zero and I have a little bit more than that. So I'm going to attach my accounts, which should give a fairly good idea of what's going on. I do have a couple of private equity investments that I will have to figure out how to display here. But I am going to go into accounts and add an account. I'm going to go to connect investments and loans. I am going to connect my Fidelity account. Everybody knows I have Fidelity accounts because I just made one out with my friend, Frank. Okay, you're being taken to Fidelity.
31:06By the way, you may want to if you have a pop up blocker enabled on your browser, that may prevent you from being able to do this on the desktop version. And by the way, I recommend that if you're going to use Monarch that you set it up on your computer, you can do it on your phone. But I think it's better to set it up on the computer dashboard. And then you can download the app and review it and update it on your phone after that. And this is something you'll want to have some time set aside and mentally prepare for the frustration of logging in or remembering all the passwords, getting all those, doing the two-factor authentication for all these old investment accounts you probably haven't checked in a while.
31:42If, for example, you have an old employer 401k or whatever, or brokerage account from years back.
31:48Mindy Jensen:Okay. And here is my Frankonomics portfolio. Earlier this morning, it was up to 10, 124 and some change. And now it's gone down a little bit. Okay, Scott, let's look at how my investments are going. Oh, look at that. I'm doing better. I'm doing better than the S &P 500. Didn't Warren Buffett have a bet going with somebody that he would beat the S &P 500 over like 10 years? Hey, Warren, call me. We'll have the, I'll make that same bet with you. Let's see. year to date. Well, maybe I should rescind that offer to Warren. Look at this. When the S &P is down, I'm really down. And year to date. Oh, yikes.
32:30Mindy Jensen:Okay. Well, then. It's impossible for me to tell this in many cases because the real estate is not valued on a regular basis super accurately. But it's a really cool tool here. Go click on dashboard. Now I'll show you this. This is the home base. That's super powerful for a lot of this. And you can change these blocks to be where you want to go. So there's a block down the page called net worth. This is not very helpful to you right now because it's a dot on the page, but it becomes a chart the longer that you have this. And so that actually goes to the top of my page. It's one of the first things I look at when I pull up my dashboard.
33:06You can actually just move that right there to the top. And then And there's a the next piece that I like to see is like my spending, because that's the one I can control. So I'll look at that. And then I have transactions as a third one. But that's just my personal preferred layout, in terms of how I use the tool. But it becomes very powerful. If you look at these three charts pretty regularly, you can see, okay, here's going on. Here's my recent transactions. And here's, here's this. And then you can click into them. And they take you to those those areas.
33:32Mindy Jensen:I like this because based on what your specific needs are with Monarch money, you can change things around. Mindy, let's add your house to the equation here. Can you go to accounts? Accounts? And then let's add some real estate. All right. Other assets. So what I would do here is go back, go back, go to Zillow. Oh, my. And then put your address and we can blur this out here. But this is kind of cool because it uses this estimate to update the value of your property in real time. Now, that could be a problem, right? If Zestimate's super unwieldy for your property, that's going to be a problem. And the Zestimate is not super perfect all the time, but it's reasonably close for me, right?
34:13I believe that my property is not way off from the Zestimate because I live in a suburb with lots of similar houses nearby. And so it's very useful there as well to add that in. And then you can also add your car.
34:26Mindy Jensen:I am going to add my, so I have a primary residence and I have a home that I am tearing down and rebuilding. Now, this is wildly inaccurate for my primary residence, but I bet it's based off of the fact that I bought it for such a low price. Yep. So go to the type there and you can make this a secondary home or rental property. And can I, I can't alter this. If you want, so I'll show you another second, how to do that for another, for a property where you want to manually input the value. Okay. This is my primary. I would like to manually input the value of that one. The other one I think is probably a good bet.
35:02Great. So go to add assets, that same category, and then go to add manual account. Oh, you could also have done what you just did. Sorry. Yeah. And real estate.
35:11Mindy Jensen:Primary home. You will, of course, have to update this value periodically. You have to name it. So then, of course, it won't update from here. That's okay. So now, where did that move? Oh, look at that. That changed my net worth just a pinch. Now, Mindy, you have a mortgage, right? I do have a mortgage. Oh, you're going to make me add that. Is that an account? That'll be an account. You want to add an account and then you'll want to connect investments and loans. So I have, I ballparked it because I can't connect my account to get the exact amount in there, but I ballparked a$300 ,000 mortgage and that now changes my net worth a little bit because it takes that$300 ,000 off of my entire net worth because it's now a liability that I didn't have entered in there before.
36:01Mindy Jensen:So this is only going to be as accurate as you entering all of your accounts. So if you've got a credit card, put it in there. You've got a bank account, put it in there. If you've got investment accounts, put them all in there and make sure that all of your accounts are connected to get the holistic look at your entire financial position. Okay, we're getting a little closer. I know that there are some accounts that I am missing here. How does Carl check your net worth every day? He uses Empower. Okay, so if you already have something set up and you're trying to switch over to Monarch, you could just go there as well and look up all your accounts.
36:37But I'm constantly, I'm still fit in with this thing and I've been using it for years just to get little things right. Like today I updated my car because I realized one wasn't using the VIN. So it's a process to do that. Probably a good cadence is once a month or once a quarter you go in, You check your spending, you make sure everything's categorized correctly. The AI didn't screw up and categorize your CPA bill as a personal spending item or whatever it is. And then you can kind of course correct on your spending behavior, course correct on your investment approach, your financial plan, or fiddle with investment accounts.
37:09Make sure that they're not updated. I just looked at mine and it looks like my HSA hasn't been linked in like two months for the last update. It's actually, I would not update that today. So there's definitely maintenance required for keeping these accounts active.
37:20Mindy Jensen:Yes. And I think the last piece of the puzzle is we're in the middle of an ill-timed transfer. So the Robin Hood should bump up and capture almost the entirety of the rest of our net worth once that goes through. This is going to consume the rest of my day, Scott. I think you can get pretty far. If you want to just look at your spending and you hook up your bank accounts and your credit cards, you should be able to do that in less than an hour and begin fiddling with useful inputs. If you want to get a truly up-to-date net worth tracker and you're a FIRE individual that has more than just a couple of simple investment accounts, you may be spending quite a bit of time linking up whoever services your mortgage and fiddling with your old HSA or 401k or whatever.
38:06So I would definitely set aside a day or figure that you're going to do three quarters of it in the first setting and it will take you another couple weeks or a month to fully round out the product there. And then, you know, you want to set up your dashboard. And then from there, I just look at it in there. And that helps me, you know, when we're going to set up our budget, it's pretty easy to say, is this realistic? Nope, because we spend way more than that every month for the last 12 months. That's not a good budget on this particular item. It's very helpful when you're doing that in the week, the monthly financial review with your spouse or whatever is just a few minutes of looking at this thing.
38:40So I find that very helpful.
38:42Mindy Jensen:Yes, so much easier once you have all of the information in one spot. I don't have to go and look at my individual credit card statements and look at my bank account and look at our investments. Like we have investments in multiple different platforms. We're still consolidating those. So trying to gather all of that information is going to be kind of a hassle for the monthly money meeting. But for everything to be in one place, it's super easy to keep an overview of where things are going and keep track of trends. And Scott, when I said I was going to spend the rest of the day on this, I meant to be that I am just going to be fascinated and play and tweak and move things around and double check that I have all the accounts in here, as opposed to it's going to take me all day to do this.
39:26Mindy Jensen:Now I'm just going to play. I mean, how long did this take? Like 45 minutes or an hour to set all of this up? I didn't have to go gather up all my logins. So if you have those all in one place, like you use a password manager, because that's a really great way to make your life easier. Yeah. Or if you just have the same insecure password for all of your financial accounts, which we do not recommend. Yes, no. Password123 is not a password for anything that I use. If you're like me and you have old accounts and all that kind of stuff, this is a great way to set up your password manager and update all those accounts at once.
39:56That will be very painful and tedious, but then you can get them all into your password manager as well if you choose to use that. So this process, you can kill two birds with one stone.
40:03Mindy Jensen:All right. Scott, this was a lot of fun. You're going to like this, Mindy, if you've never used it before. I think it's the best net worth tracker spending tracker software in existence right now for normal folks that have relatively normalish financial positions and are looking to accumulate. I do think the limitations are it's not super great if you have a lot of sprawling private investments. Like you got 30 rental properties. This is not your tool. There'll be some benefits to using this in other capacities, but it's not going to really help you achieve that goal. But if you have mostly publicly traded investments in retirement accounts, for example, this is a very, very powerful way to track your finances, check your net worth regularly, understand your spending, set a basic budget, and all those kinds of things.
40:47So I and it's pretty cheap, I think, like 100 bucks a year. For this, the amount of time this saves me is pretty incredible.
40:54Mindy Jensen:Yeah, this is going to be really a fantastic tool. I can't wait to obsess over this. Well, cool. Well, it was fun to set this up with you today, Mindy. Thanks for for giving us a glimpse into your finances in so much detail here. Glimpse is not the right word. An in-depth breakdown of your finances, mostly complete. And what was this like 30, 35, 45 minutes? It is fairly easy to set up. You have all of your logins anyway. So you just enter them as you go. I believe I will remember more things as I'm sitting here looking at this. Oh yeah, I forgot about this credit card, this one-off random card, or I forgot about this, this one investment that isn't in any of these other places.
41:34Mindy Jensen:But I think it's a great way to get a snapshot of your finances. And as I get used to coming in and looking at this dashboard, it's going to be really easy to like, oh, doing great today or oh, this month is really not looking good spend wise. I can't wait to see all the money that I'm spending on this house to build. And I want to keep track of that in my holistic financial overview. So that's why I created that new category. I would love to hear from our viewers. Do you like Monarch Money? What specific parts of it do you love? And what tabs along the side am I missing that I need to go back and dive into a little bit more?
42:10Mindy Jensen:You can email Mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com. You can email Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com. We'd love to hear from you. Absolutely. And as a reminder, Monarch is finally, after all these years, sponsoring the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. We have a regular advertising arrangement with them. They did not ask us to do this video. We wanted to do this video for two reasons. One, we love Monarch. We're super excited to have them as a sponsor, but also we want to blow them away by helping more people discover them. So if you do want to use Monarch, please use the code POCKETS. When you sign up, you'll get 50 % off instead of the 30 % off that you would get without a specific code for that first year.
42:45It's 50 bucks for your first year. It's a powerful tool. Let them know that you found it with BiggerPockets money. That helps us and allows us to keep making all this content for free because we make money when folks watch our content or listen to our content and view or potentially act on the ads. So we hope this was helpful. We are super proud and excited to be sponsored by Monarch Money.
43:02Mindy Jensen:Thank you, Monarch. And again, we would love to hear from you. So don't hesitate to reach out to Scott or I. All right, Scott, should we get out of here? Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPocketsMoney podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying toodaloo, boo.
From the publisher
Ever wondered how financial experts ACTUALLY manage their own money? Mindy Jensen opens her real financial accounts LIVE on this episode!
In this groundbreaking BiggerPockets Money podcast episode, hosts Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench deliver unprecedented financial transparency. Mindy tracks her personal net worth and finances in real-time using Monarch Money, giving you an authentic behind-the-scenes look at how a financial expert truly manages her money.
This Episode Covers:
- Live demonstration of actual account connections
- Mindy's real spending patterns and financial habits
- Advanced Monarch Money features most people miss
- How to automate your entire financial tracking system
- Why regular financial reviews change everything
- Exclusive listener discount for Monarch Money (Get 50% off your 1st Year with the Promo Code POCKETS)
Whether you're drowning in financial chaos or ready to level up your money management game, this episode shows you exactly how to centralize and streamline your finances like a true professional.
00:39 Why We Love Monarch Money
01:50 Tracking Your Net Worth
06:29 Setting Up Your Monarch Money Account
16:39 Budgeting How To
22:06 Tracking Spending
25:05 Total Net Worth
27:48 Setting Up Monarch Money
35:11 Sign up for Monarch Money Today!
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