Quarterly Financial Reviews: How My Wife and I Stay on Track to Hit Our Goals

Once every quarter, my wife and I get together to review our family finances. We do this mainly to keep our spending and investments aligned with our goals. But it also helps us to get on the same page, to exchange financial knowledge, and to make important decisions together. It took us a couple of iterations to arrive at the current process, which is broken down into four steps, takes us less than 30 minutes, and requires updating a single spreadsheet only. I’ve shared our process with a couple of friends recently. They found it useful, so I thought it might be worth sharing it here too. Step 1: Get an up-to-date snapshotThe first thing we do is to create an up-to-date snapshot of our finances. Our assets and liabilities are spread over multiple accounts (bank accounts, brokerage accounts, loans and debt, physical cash, retirement funds). For each of these accounts, we have to log in and copy their current values into a spreadsheet. And while we’re at it, we also download related…