Budgetwarrior: Track assets and portfolio, savings rates and auto-completion

Track assets

The first feature I've added is a feature to precisely track each of your assets independently. And you can also track the allocation of your portfolio in terms of stocks, bonds and cash. The tool also lets you set the desired distribution of your assets and will compute the difference that you should make in order to comply to your desired distribution.

First, you need to define all your asset classes (your accounts, funds, and stocks, ...) and their distribution with budget asset add. It also supports to set a currency. The default currency is now CHF, but you can set it in the configuration file, for instance default_currency=USD. You can see your assets using budget asset:

You can then set the value of your assets using budget asset value add. The system will save all the values of your assets. For now, only the last value is used in the application to display. In the future, I plan to add new reports for evolution of the portfolio over time. You can see your current net worth with the budget asset value:

The different currencies will all be converted to the default currency.

Savings rate

The second change I did is to compute the savings rate of each month and year. The savings rate is simply the portion of your income that you are able to save each month. The savings rate for a year is simple the average of the savings rate of each month.

The savings rate of the month can be seen with budget overview month:

The saving rates of each month can also be seen in the overview of the year with budget overview year:

This shows the savings rate of each month, the average of the year and the average of the current year up to the current month.

The savings rate is a very important metric of your budget. In my case, it's currently way too low and made me realize I really need to save more. Any savings rate below 10% is too low. There are no rule as too much it should be, but I'd like to augment mine to at least 20% next year.

Auto-completion

The last feature is mostly some quality-of-life improvement. Some of the inputs in the console can now be completed. It's not really auto-completion per se, but you can cycle through the list of possible values using the UP and DOWN.

This makes it much easier to set some values such as asset names (in budget asset value add for instance), account names and objective types and sources. I'm trying to make the input of values easier.

Conclusion

I don't know exactly what else will be integrated in this feature, but I may already improve some visualization for asset values. If I learn something new about personal finance that I may integrate in the tool, I'll do it as well.

If you are interested by the sources or want to install this version, you can download them on Github: budgetwarrior.

The new features are in the master branch.

If you have a suggestion for a new features or you found a bug, please post an issue on Github, I'd be glad to help you.

If you have any comment, don't hesitate to contact me, either by letting a comment on this post or by email.