Re: Re: Net Worth

[Eric Poulin]

#3629

We’ve been having internal discussions about a net worth report for almost a year, so its definitely something we’d like to do.
As you’ve mentioned there are a number of challenges.  In addition to what you’ve outlines, here are some of the challenges we’ve identified:

• Because CalendarBudget’s strength is in being able to move into the future (and past) we’d need to be able to calculate the value of assets/investments/liabilities/debts/ etc with time value. Yes, its no problem to get these equations and code them, but the challenge is having you enter that data.  The simplicity of CalendarBudget quickly disappears when you have to enter lots of investments and guess at their growth rate.
• For debt payoff, CalendarBudget would be a great tool to calculate exactly when the debt is paid off.  Since you could mark on specific days to put a prepayment, we’d be able to accurately tell you when the debt will disappear.  I really like this, because generally there is no guessing (except for variable rate loans).  For variable rate loans, we’d have to assume its a fixed rate and allow you to make balance corrections and change the rate.
• Do we allow people to enter all their assets?  What about a car, for example, which depreciates on a weird curve.  People would have to estimate the value of their vehicle and CalendarBudget would then need to figure out some algorithm to depreciate the value over time

In the end, because of these identified challenges, we’ve put the Net Worth report on the back-burner.  We still want to do it, and we think these challenges can be overcome to some degree, while still maintaining the simplicity and ease of use that is CalendarBudget.

We’ve toyed with the idea of having a premium version which has some of these more complicated bells an whistles… Still unsure about that.  We’ll get closer to a decision about that as we approach the end of the beta.