Adjusted Cost Base Tracking Spreadsheet

ACB v1p1

This spreadsheet is designed to help you keep track of your adjusted cost basis (ACB) for your stocks, mutual funds or ETFs. You can download version 1.1 here.

The spreadsheet was updated to version 1.1 in May 2017. Ability to enter foreign exchange rates for stocks and funds listed in foreign currency has been added. 

My post Financial Basics 12 - Keeping Track of Adjusted Cost Base gives a good summary of why and how to use the spreadsheet. 

Each sheet within the workbook is to be used to track ACB for one stock, mutual fund or ETF. 

Financial Basics 12 - Keeping Track of Adjusted Cost Base

This post is about why and how to keep track of the adjusted cost base (ACB) of your ETFs in your taxable account. 

Why?

Just to make doing your taxes even more painful? Seems that way!

Updated May 2017 as the ACB spreadsheet has been enhanced to include foreign exchange input for transactions in foreign currency. 
Updated December 2016 to add another link in the Other Info section and update the RCGD table to include 2015 and 2016.

Financial Basics 14 - Simple Investing

This post is about describing, in the most simple terms, how to get started doing your own investing.

When I looked back at my financial basics series, I realized that there were 4 posts (#7 through #10) dedicated to the subject of simply how to invest and what to invest in. Even though I tried to simplify the guidance, it still ends up being long and a bit complicated. This may deter people from trying to invest on their own, which goes against my reason for writing this series.  This post is to simplify the process of investing even further than those 4 posts. Hopefully this post will give you enough information to get started and as you get more experience and confidence you will read posts #7 through #10 and many of the other resources available.

Financial Basics 10 - Investing and Re-balancing

This post is about managing your investments and accounts, how to make investments and how to re-balance your portfolio of investments.  



We will revisit the example portfolio from post #7 and the determination of which funds we will put in particular accounts. Then I will propose an easy way to make the contributions and buy the funds each month. We will make use of a Google Sheets spreadsheet that helps us determine which funds to buy in each account. 

Financial Basics 9 - Which Fund in Which Account?

This post is about which funds you should put into each of your different types of accounts (RRSP, TFSA or Taxable)

Which fund to put into which account? This is about taxes, so if you read further on in this post and think you are missing something, you should go back and read Financial Basics 2 - Income Tax to review how different types of income are taxed and Financial Basics 3 - How Different Savings Accounts Work to review how income in the different types of accounts are taxed. 

Financial Basics 8 - Investment Portfolio Alternatives

This post is about alternatives to the portfolio I recommended in the previous post

This post was originally created in April 2015 and updated in April 2017. The Portfolio Alternatives table has been updated along with some wording. 

If you consider alternatives to my recommendation, please remember that each of these ETFs already have a great degree of diversification.  If you stick to index tracking ETFs, have an appropriate percentage of Bond ETF and cover the worlds stock markets, you should not need more than 4 ETFs.  In some cases you may be able to reduce this to 3 by picking one world (non-Canadian) ETF instead of having one each for the US and International.

Financial Basics 7 - Investment Portfolio

This post is about your investment portfolio.  Which funds you hold, what percentages and what account you will put them in.  

This post was originally created in March 2015 and updated in April 2017. The Portfolio table has been updated along with some wording. 

One objective of these blog posts is to provide a simple reference for saving and investing for retirement. I want to take much of the available information on the internet and simplify it so that it is can serve as concise reference material.  Often when you do that much of the background information that goes into determining the best saving and investing strategy may be lost, but I don't want that to happen. I will structure this blog post to begin with the basics and providing more detail later on in this post and the subsequent one. 

Retirement Planning and Forecasting Spreadsheet 2.0 (for Canada)

Retirement Forecaster 2.7

Updated to version 2.7 on March 24th, 2017. 

In this version I have updated the tax tables to include the 2017 federal and provincial tax brackets and rates. There was nothing in the March 22nd budget that affected the calculations.

Download new version here.  

A complete list of upgrades by version is included in the Instructions sheet in the workbook.

This spreadsheet allows you to make an accurate financial plan for your retirement, starting at any time in your life.  Unlike many retirement tools, this spreadsheet shows a cash flow forecast vs time and identifies which account money is saved into (during employment) and which account or source the retirement income is withdrawn from.  It handles the different account types (RRSP, LIRA, TFSA and a taxable investment account), the limits imposed on them and does income tax calculations for any of the provinces.  

The picture below shows the main page of the spreadsheet which contains all the inputs you need (in yellow) and provides a cash flow forecast and how the savings accounts increase and decline.  

I hope you find the tool useful and I am always willing to hear of suggestions to improve it. 

X-Y Plots (4Y) Spreadsheet - Another Easy Way To Explore Your Data

This Spreadsheet...

• This spreadsheet is similar to the X-Y Plots spreadsheet but with a few differences:
• You can plot up to 4 Y variables on the same chart.
• Each category is a separate plot. 
• You can easily switch between plots (different category).

Monte Carlo - Run Monte Carlo Simulation without expensive add-ins

(Stanislaw Ulam - inventor of Monte Carlo Simulation)

This Spreadsheet...

• This spreadsheet allows you to run Monte Carlo simulation without use of expensive add-ins such as Crystal Ball
• Allows definition of many different input distributions.
• Input distribution may also be input from actual data.
• Shows charts of input and output distributions, along with basic statistics.
• Copies results to Histograms Etc spreadsheet for more detailed results.

Histograms Etc - Easy Histograms, Probability Plots and Statistics

This Spreadsheet...

• This spreadsheet allows you to quickly create professional looking histograms, probability plots and statistics of data.
• Plots histograms and cumulative probability plots for up to 10 distributions of data.  
• Calculates statistics for each data set.
• Calculates best fit normal and lognormal distribution.  

X-Y Plots Spreadsheet - An Easy Way To Explore Your Data

This Spreadsheet...

• This spreadsheet allows you to quickly create professional looking plots of data.
• This spreadsheet is useful for looking for trends and relationships in your data.
• You just paste in the data to the data sheet, name the columns and select which columns you want to plot in the Chart sheet.
• With this spreadsheet it is easy to:
• plot separate series (different colour points) categorized by one of your data fields.
• filter the data you want to plot.
• plot regression lines through the different series.
• plot bin averages for scattered data.
• annotate the data with labels automatically.

Regression Modeling Spreadsheet (automatic stepwise multiple linear regression)

This spreadsheet does:

• Multiple linear regression.
• Can use linear, square and interaction terms for all the variables you enter.
• Stepwise multiple linear regression to find the best model automatically.
• Provides results and many useful diagnostic plots.
• Provides a suggestion of which independent terms may be confounded (useful for regression of experimental design data).

My Philosophy On The Use Of Spreadsheet Tools

Spreadsheets are great tools. As much as computers have transformed the way we work (and play to some extent) the spreadsheet has been as important to transform the way the technical professional works. Many professionals use spreadsheets to do things that were once extremely time consuming. When I went to University in the early 1980s, we did plotting, data analysis, statistics and regression by hand or with the use of calculators. It took a long time and was easy to make mistakes, which then would require the calculation or plot to be re-done. By the time I started working in the mid 1980s, personal computers were making their way into the office and spreadsheets arrived shortly thereafter. First was Lotus 1-2-3, which was ground breaking, but eventually Excel became the standard. 

Good old Lotus 1-2-3