Automatic Car Value Tracking

trewbux

@DryHeat Yours is a reasonable approach. Another reasonable approach is to track any asset that contributes to your net worth, especially when there’s an associated liability (car loan). If you have a $20k loan that’s part of your overall liabilities but it’s associated with a car that’s worth $30k then without including that asset your overall net worth will be skewed.

DryHeat

@trewbux I agree it's reasonable to do it either way.

It kind of depends on the use you have for the "net worth" figure. The net worth that I am interested in tracking consists of the assets that I can use to fund my life now and could potentially use to fund my life (or my child's life) in the future. I view demand and investment accounts as candidates for those uses (both now and in the future), and real estate holdings as candidates for use in the farther future.

But I don't really view my cars as assets that might fund my future life. Instead, they will sit out there and demand care and feeding for several years until they depreciate so much as to be negligible. (Come to think of it, that pretty well describes me.☹️)

My view is partly driven by the way I deal with cars — I buy them and drive them until they are pretty well used up. Then I use whatever residual value there is to fund part of the next car and the cycle starts over. In other words, I don't see myself selling the car and using the money for other purposes.

My view is also driven by the financial planning software I use. It is very detailed and takes many things into account, but it does not consider automobiles to be assets for planning purposes. (I don't suppose I should identify the software here, but it functions on the premise of "consumption smoothing" and has helped me tremendously.)

SRC54

@DryHeat Well, it's still a work in progress but what I do is make a transaction for my car on the date that I bought it and I update it with the current Carfax trade-in value every month or so.

Here's the current transaction for my present car:

I got a good trade-in on my 2014 CRV so they were transfers. So far my expenses are the sales tax and dealer fees (yuck) and depreciation. So my simple expense so far is about $6700 in 4 years.

I also add the 2021 HRV tag to insurance, maintenance, gasoline, etc. so I can do a report, which shows a total cost so far of $13717.94. The Dealer payee includes the depreciation, which is why it is so high.

For my past cars that are now valued at 0.00, I don't have the total expenses as I started this with my latest car. The same is true of my wife's 2019 CRV

The simple cost was was $10890.00 but of course with insurance, licenses, repairs and maintenance and gasoline, it is much more.

DryHeat

@SRC54

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I used to do something similar in my previous bookkeeping software, taking all the figures off the purchase docs and parsing them out into assets, liabilities, and expenses. And tracking depreciation.

But I quit doing it (with the exception of loan tracking) because I didn't see the benefit from the effort.

That's why, in my earlier post, I asked WHY you did it (rather than HOW you did it).

@trewbux says it's to avoid a skewed picture of net worth. I get that, but I don't feel I really need it.

SRC54

@DryHeat LOL. Yeah, one reason I gave you the details is I figured you could point out some holes in what I am doing. Basically I do it to keep my net worth somewhat accurate as well as because I'm retired so what else do I have to do? Accounting/Bookkeeping is kind of fun to me.

And I thought it would be neat to know just how much cars actually cost us. A lot, but what can we do? You notice I get the cheapest thing I can find.

But my wife is getting a new CRV next month and I already priced them. Sticker shock! It will be at least $34K!

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/50435#Comment_50435

I saved my car in Simplifi for information as I bought it outright. I enter a balance adjustment to update the value using KBB as the source. I update the value twice a year or so. Having said that, my 10 year old car is not a major contributor to my net worth.

UrsulaA

I upvoted this request a while ago.

botjnilt

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/50435#Comment_50435

Not who you directed it to but I'm a business owner that has to provide financial disclosures for bank LOCs (yes, personally guaranteed) and the Net worth report meets this need for me assuming I have everything in it (yes including assets and liabilities - all of them). What they ask is extremely complete and missing something like a vehicle asset can put you on the bad boy list 😕

UrsulaA

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/comment/50781#Comment_50781

agree that this should be a feature for business users with the business and personal version. If the feature results in a higher subscription fee, the personal only users should have an option to opt out.