How to track assets?

MoneyWiz does not yet support fully-fledged asset accounts but there is a great workaround available!

Iliya Yordanov avatar
Written by Iliya Yordanov
Updated over a week ago

While MoneyWiz does not have a direct support for assets, you can use our investment account to track them. Please read the investment accounts guide for details on how to use the tool overall - this guide will provide you with guidance on how to tweak it to track custom assets (like your house, car, etc).

You'll have to create a manually managed investment account. The cash balance should be 0.00 - if it's anything else, it'd mean that there's any non-asset money laying around somewhere. You might wonder how you'll register all of the assets value with 0.00 cash value - don't worry! When creating your investment account for the first time, you're presented with an opportunity to describe your portfolio - entering holdings "for free". Please think carefully what assets you wish to track and how much are they worth as you won't get this chance anymore. Should you wish to log another asset at later date to this account, you'll need to use the Buy transaction, which will reduce the cash amount value (but we'll get to that later).

When trying to find share prices for you, MoneyWiz looks up Yahoo! Finance database. So in order to prevent Yahoo! Finance from interfering with your custom asset prices, just enter a holding that is not present in their database:

  • PAWELSHOME for your home,

  • PAWELSCAR for your car,

  • and so on.

This will allow you to set a custom price for each asset. If you wish to register an asset such as a house, you want to enter price per share to the overall value of your house and set the quantity to 1. If you own multiple assets of the same type, you can enter a different quantity but only if the assets are all of the same value and depreciate at the same rate - otherwise you should use different symbols (PAWELSBMW, PAWELSMINI).

Once you describe your portfolio, go ahead and finish creating your account.

Updating the asset value

Once it's time to re-evaluate your assets value, just head over to Holdings tab, click on an asset and use the Update price button.

As you use the Update price button, you'll see that the chart above gets more and more detailed, instead of remaining flat.

Purchasing a new asset

If you bought a new asset or simply want to register another one, you'll have to use the Buy feature to buy a new holding. This will reduce your cash value by the value of the asset. For accuracy, you'll want to bring the cash value back to 0. Probably the easiest way to do this is to start creating new transaction and select Adjust balance. Set it to 0.00 and save.

Alternatively, you can of course transfer the missing money from your other account (the one that was actually used to purchase the asset). But since transfer transactions cannot have a category, you might want to keep that purchase logged as an expense in the original account and use the Adjust balance trick in your asset account.

Selling an existing asset

It's pretty much the opposite of the above. Use the Sell feature to sell your asset. It'll disappear from the portfolio but raise your cash value accordingly. Again, you can make a decision whether to transfer that value to your regular account or use the Adjust balance function and track the income separately with an income transaction.

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