I’ve just uploaded a v1.11 release of NetWorth, my personal finance / net worth tracking / budgeting app for Android. This is a pet project, just modelling how I thought and have learned about personal finance and retirement planning. I was hoping to do a grand 2.0 release but as ever time evaporates and I couldn’t quite get there yet. However I did manage to find some time for a lot of nice improvements and figured it was worth pushing them out until I get working on it again.

Changes in v1.11

• Added a breakdown of asset categories (cash, investments, assets, liabilities) when viewing projections, snapshots, and snapshot comparisons.
• Monthly budget transactions set to days of the month that might not be present in all months (29-31) will now trigger on the last day of shorter months. i.e. A monthly recurrence set to the 30th of every month will now trigger on Feb 28.
• Fixed a bug with loan transactions continuing to fire after the loan account is closed.
• Spent a lot of time trying to improve the UX for the create/edit account activities. This is one of the weaker aspects of the app right now and I hope to find time to focus on all the other main activities in the future.
• Added a tab for budget transactions of type transfer so they’re easier to find.
• Can now specify budget transactions that occur on multiple days each month. (which simplifies things if for example you’re paid on the 15th and 30th) Now just one transaction is required for this and will clean up the display of your budget overview and projections.

Other Thoughts

NetWorth does not contain any analytics, I wanted to value your privacy above all else given the nature of the app. As such I don’t really know how people are using it. I have suspicions however that the way I implemented future projections, specifying fine grained recurring transactions that compose your budget, then extrapolating this out over the long term, may not be used by most users as it’s too complicated (and a little clunky) to set up. I did this because it’s pretty handy for short term decisions, seeing what you should have available and where in 6 months or a couple years. It can help to expose where you have more or less room to invest, or where your budget might be very inaccurate.

However long term investing is really a lot simpler. For the most part you’re committing to pushing X per year into investments, you expect them to perform at some percentage each year, you need to get to a certain amount to retire, and you’re done.

I am planning to add a retirement planner activity to the app, but I’m not entirely sure yet how it should work with the above points in mind. I suspect it will be something akin to specifying your investment total goal, at this point the app could use the fine grained data we have to tell you how long that will take given your current budget, or if it’s possible at all. If by some chance a user of the app actually were to read this, I’d appreciate your thoughts in comments or by email.

I am about done with the dark grey and green theme, I hope to rework this to get something that looks a little better in a future release.

Other high priority items for the future currently include:

• More work on UX for accounts, transactions, snapshots.
• Implement flat rate taxation for investment accounts for more accurate retirement planning.
• Implement capital gains taxation for investment accounts. (might get tricky to track what was contributed vs earned in interest)
• Show cumulative delta of snapshots vs expectations from the budget.