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Tiller Money Review and User’s Guide (2023)

March 2, 2021 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Tiller Money enables you to manage your financial life in spreadsheets that are automatically updated every day. The tools make it easy to create budgets, track net worth, and even manage your Investments. We'll take a deep dive into the tool in this 2022 Tiller Money review and user guide.

Tiller Money Review
Tiller Money Review
In this review
 [hide]
  • How Tiller Money Works
    • Connecting Financial Accounts to Tiller Money
    • Creating Spreadsheets with Tiller's Foundation Template
    • Using Tiller's Tools to Manage your Finances
  • Tiller Google Sheet Add-ons
    • Tiller Money Feeds
    • Tiller Money Labs
  • Budgeting with Tiller Money
  • Is Tiller Safe?
  • How Much Does Tiller Cost?
  • Tiller Rating
  • Tiller Money Video

I met the Tiller Money team several years ago at Fincon, a personal finance bloggers conference. They were kind enough to give me a demo of their software. At the time, I'll be honest, I didn't really understand how Tiller Money worked. I found it confusing at first.

Once I understood the basic concept, however, it became clear just how powerful and easy it is to use. More recently, I've spent a lot of time with the tool and absolutely love it. It's become my primary budgeting tool, which I use in conjunction with Personal Capital to track my investments.

In this review and user's guide, I'll walk through the main features of Tiller Money, how I use the tool, and how it can help you manage your money.

How Tiller Money Works

Many people, myself included, love working with spreadsheets. They are easy to use and give us complete control over our data. When it comes to budgeting and managing money with a spreadsheet, however, there are three key problems:

  1. We have to manually enter our income and expenses;
  2. We have to spend time designing the spreadsheet if we want it to look good; and
  3. We don't have basic tools available with must budgeting apps

Tiller Money solves each of these problems.

Tiller Money enables you to link your financial accounts to a Google or Excel spreadsheet. Once linked, transaction data and balances are automatically downloaded into the spreadsheet. That solves the first problem.

Tiller also provides a robust template that can enable you to track your budget, net worth, investments, and even your business income and expenses. Problem number two solved.

Finally, Tiller gives you a robust and growing set of tools to analyze your finances. We'll look at several in just a minute. Problem number three solved. In fact, Tiller solves these issues so well that it made my list of the best Quicken alternatives.

Connecting Financial Accounts to Tiller Money

The first step to using Tiller Money is to connect your financial accounts. Tiller enables you to connect checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, and even investment accounts. Tiller uses bank level security through Yodlee, which nine out of the 15 largest banks in the country also use.

Once logged in to Tiller, you simply click the Add Accounts button.

A pop-up box will prompt you to search for your financial institution. I've yet to encounter a bank account, credit card or investment account that Tiller can't handle. You'll enter your login credentials for your financial institution to connect it. Tiller money will never have access to your login credentials or to any of your financial institutions (more about security below).

Get Tiller 30-Day Free Trial

Creating Spreadsheets with Tiller's Foundation Template

The heart and soul of Tiller is the Tiller Foundation Template. While you can create your own spreadsheet from scratch, I highly recommend you start with the Tiller template. You simply launch the Google Sheet and walk through a number of easy steps to authorize the template in your Google account (see video below for a walk-thru of the process).

Tiller Monthly Budget Dashboard
Tiller Monthly Budget Dashboard

Here's where one thing tripped me up. Having connected my accounts, I launched the Tiller Foundation Template. When I opened it, there were no transactions. What it took me some time to understand is that connecting my accounts to Tiller does not automatically connect them to the spreadsheet. That's actually good news.

It allows me to connect those accounts that I want to in up to five spreadsheets. For example, I connect our personal accounts to our personal budget spreadsheet. I connect my business checking account and credit card to a separate Tiller spreadsheet I use to track my business. And I connect our investment accounts to yet a third Tiller spreadsheet to track our net worth.

Of course, you decided how to set up Tiller. You could track everything in one spreadsheet if that's what you wanted to do. For each of up to five spreadsheets, you can connect any or all of the financial accounts you've connected to Tiller. Once you have the spreadsheet set up and connected the financial accounts, Tiller offers a host of tools and templates to manage virtually every aspect of your financial life. 

Using Tiller's Tools to Manage your Finances

Once you've launched the Tiller Foundation Template and connected your accounts to the spreadsheet, you'll notice a number of tabs in the Google Sheet. These include the Insights tab, which is a financial dashboard that gives you a high level summary of your financial data. There's a Transactions tab that lists all of the transactions from all of the accounts you've connected to the spreadsheet. A Categories tab enables you to define your income and expense categories and set a monthly budget for each expense.

There's a monthly budget tab that summarizes your income and expense data by month. There's also a yearly budget tab, that shows you all of your income and expenses for an entire year.

Tiller Google Sheet Add-ons

There are two really important add-ons to Google Sheets that you'll want to use with Tiller. One is called Tiller Money Feeds, and the other is called Tiller Money Labs.

Tiller Money Feeds

Tiller Money Feeds provides the tools you need to connect your financial accounts to each spreadsheet. We've already covered it above, and it gets added to your spreadsheet as part of the process of using the template.

It includes a feature called AutoCat, which allows you to automatically categorize income and expenses based on the transaction description. More about this feature in a moment.

Tiller Money Labs

The Tiller Money Labs add-on provides additional tools that are incredibly useful. You can add it to Google Sheets by going to the Add-ons menu, select Get Add-ons, and then searching for Tiller Money Labs. This Add-on gives you access to a number of extremely useful tools that are far too numerous to cover in one review. But I'll highlight a few of the more important ones.

Split transactions: As the name suggests, it makes it very easy to split a transaction across multiple categories.

Net worth dashboard:  A template focusing on balances and how they change over time. It includes a net worth chart and trends table for up to 12 months of net worth data. A similar tool, called the Net Worth Snapshot, enables you to compare your net worth over two different years.

Debt planner: A streamlined debt-planning tool to build and manage your debt payoff plan and achieve debt freedom.

Bill payment tracker: The Bill Payment Tracker is designed to keep you informed about your upcoming bill payments.

Tiller also offers a number of dashboards for small businesses. I use a separate Google Sheet to track the income and expenses of my business. While I have a bookkeeper and use QuickBooks, I like Tiller as the better way to actually budget my expenses and to track them, day to day. It's just much easier than QuickBooks.

There are even tools for those pursuing FIRE (financial independence / retire early). Specifically, it offers a Retirement Planner that estimates the total value of your investments into the future. You can experiment with different growth rate scenarios and project outcomes in real time.

Budgeting with Tiller Money

Budgeting is the core Tiller feature. Once you've connected your financial accounts to the spreadsheet, the first thing you should do, in my opinion, is set up your categories in the Tiller Foundation Template. Here's what the categories tab looks like in the template:

Tiller Money Category Sheet
Tiller Categories Sheet

You can and should customize the categories and groups. The groups organize the categories when viewed on a monthly or yearly basis. If you love the 50/30/20 budget, you could use just three groups that map to Needs (50%), Wants (30%) and Freedom (20%–savings, investing and debt paydown). You can also set your budget for the year. Any budget amounts you enter in the Jan 2022 column will automatically populate for the rest of the year.

Once you've created your categories, you can go to the transaction tab and begin giving each income and expense transaction a category. Here it's important to know that Tiller offers what it calls an automatic category tool (AutoCat). What this allows you to do is to automatically set the category of a transaction based on the contents of the transaction description.

For example, you could set all transactions with a description that includes “Starbucks” to a coffee category or perhaps a restaurant category. Once these AutoCat categories are set up, the vast majority of your transactions will be automatically and correctly categorized. It's a very cool feature.

Is Tiller Safe?

One important question is whether Tiller Money is safe. The short answer is yes. Tiller supports two factor authentication. When you connect a financial account with two factor authentication enabled the pop-up box will ask you for the code that either gets texted to you or that is generated from an authentication app if that's what you use. The data is protected with bank grade 256 bit AES encryption.

Furthermore, Tiller connects to your financial institutions using Yodlee. It's an industry standard tool used by nine of the 15 largest U.S. banks. As noted earlier, Tiller does not see or store your login credentials to your financial accounts. In addition, no one at Tiller will see your data unless you specifically choose to share it with a Tiller analyst or support team member. Tiller's access to your accounts is strictly read only, and it has no ability to move any of your money.

How Much Does Tiller Cost?

You can use Tiller for free for 30 days without any obligation. If you like it and want to continue using it, it's $79 a year.

Tiller Rating

Tiller Money Rating

Rob Berger

Features
Ease of Use
Budgeting
Cost
Community

Summary

Tiller Money is one of the best budgeting tools available today. It gives you the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spreadsheet, with the tools and templates that compete with the best budgeting apps available today.

4.6

Tiller Money Video

Tiller Money–Budgeting Spreadsheet

Filed Under: Tools

Morningstar User’s Guide

May 10, 2020 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Welcome to the Morningstar User's Guide. We're going to cover everything you need to know about using and getting the most advantage out of Morningstar. In this first article and video, we'll cover an overview of Morningstar. We will also look at some resources you'll need as we work through this guide.

It's my hope that this will help you become a better, more confident investor.

Table Of Contents
  1. Morningstar User's Guide Video
  2. Morningstar Overview
  3. Issues with Morningstar's New Website
  4. This Morningstar User's Guide
    • Part 1: The Data
    • Part 2: Using The Data
    • Part 3: Portfolio Manager
    • Part 4: Morningstar Tools
  5. Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User's Guide
    • Membership
    • Snapshot and Glossary
    • Morningstar Search Tool

Morningstar User's Guide Video

Morningstar Overview

Morningstar was founded in 1984. Before the internet as we know it, by Joe Mansueto. The story is that he started it in his apartment in Chicago with about $80,000. I don't know if that's true, but regardless, he started Morningstar in 1984. Today, it's a publicly traded company trading under the ticker MORN. It went public in 2005.

Last year, Morningstar generated about $1.2 billion in revenue. By my calculations, individual investors who pay for the premium version of Morningstar accounted for only about $22 million. Most of the revenue comes from tools designed for professional money managers and investment advisors. Some of these tools can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.

The good news is that Morningstar made a lot of its data available for free to individual investors. And its premium version, which offers additional tools, is only $199. So that's the good news.

Issues with Morningstar's New Website

Now, there is some bad news. Last year Morningstar made some substantial changes to its website. They launched the new website in July 2019. The look of the new site is an improvement, sort of.

Here's what the old site looked like:

Morningstar old website

And here's the current website design:

Morningstar new website

The problem is that the functionality took a big hit for several reasons.

First of all, they took away a lot of the tools and data that were available in the old version of the site. For example, the removed the after-tax returns of mutual funds, which I thought was a very helpful data point. There are ways to get at that information, and we will cover that when we get to it in the series. That's the good news, we can still get back to this old version, for now.

Second, they haven't bothered to update the user guide. The Premium User Guide for paid members still reflects the old website design and functionality. I reached out to Morningstar support, thinking I just couldn't find the new guide. Nope. They haven't updated it. I guess that makes this User's Guide all the more important!

Finally, many of the tools that still exist are really hard to find. In the old version they had a menu item called “Tools.” Seems simple enough. That page now no longer exists. So there's no one page to go to to see all of the tools Morningstar offers investors.

This Morningstar User's Guide

This guide will be divided into four parts.

Part 1: The Data

The first part is going to be simply understanding the data. It'll be creating a number of videos that walk through all of the data about mutual funds, ETFs an stocks that Morningstar offers.

Part 2: Using The Data

Now that we have all this data from Part 1, how do we actually use it to make important investment decisions? That's what we will cover in Part 2. First, we'll figure out of all of the data you get from Morningstar, what pieces of it are really important. And then once we know that, we'll cover how to use the data.

How do we use it to pick a mutual fund in our 401k? How do we compare two mutual funds? So we'll be looking at that in part two.

Part 3: Portfolio Manager

In Part 3, we're going to be looking at the portfolio manager in Morningstar.
We will walk through the Portfolio Manager, showing you how to set up your own portfolio, how to add new holdings, and then the different ways you can use the tool to evaluate your investments.

Part 4: Morningstar Tools

In Part 4 we will look at Morningstar Tools. These include fund and stock screeners, calculators, and the X-Ray tool.

Morningstar Resources You Need Handy for this User's Guide

To finish out this brief overview, I want to talk about some things that that you want to keep in mind that are important as we move through the series.

Membership

The first is the Morningstar membership options. For individual investors like you and me, there's are two options. At a minimum, you'll want the Morningstar basic membership. It's free, and you will need it to create and monitor your portfolio. If you want the premium version, it costs $199 per year.

Here's what the two options cover:

Morningstar Membership Options
Try Morningstar for Free

While I'm a Premium member, it's not necessary for most people.

Snapshot and Glossary

Two more things briefly, that I think you should focus on, or at least have handy. The first is Morningstar Snapshot definitions.This gives you the definitions of key terms and concepts that we will encounter throughout this series.

For example, Morningstar categorizes mutual funds as a stock, bond or balanced fund. One might think that a bond mutual fund invests in bonds. Well, it does, but Morningstar categorizes a fund as a bond fund if at least 80% of its assets are on bonds. As a result, a “bond” mutual fund could also have a not insignificant amount invested in equities.

As another example, consider Morningstar's definition of an international stock fund. According to Snapshot, it's a stock fund that has invested 40% or more of its equity holdings in foreign stocks. So don't assume you know Morningstar's definition of these terms.

A similar tool is the Morningstar Glossary. It offers a wider range of investing terms.

Morningstar Search Tool

The last thing I want to show you in this overview is the search box on Morningstar. This really is the door through which you'll find a lot of the things that you need on Morningstar. For example, you can you the search box in several ways to find key information on Morningstar:

  • Ticker: Search an investment by its ticker symbol
  • Name: Search a mutual fund or stock by name
  • Screener: Search the term “Screener” to find Morningstar's stock and fund screeners
  • Tool: Search the term “Tool” to find Morningstar's calculators and other investment tools

Filed Under: Investing, Tools

12 Personal Finance, Investing and Retirement Tools

May 9, 2020 by Rob Berger

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, meaning at no cost to you I earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase or open an account. I only recommend products or services that I (1) believe in and (2) would recommend to my mom. Advertisers have had no control, influence, or input on this article, and they never will.

Personal finance, investing and retirement planning tools can help you make the most of your money. From budgeting to investing, saving to improving your credit, the resources below will empower you to take back control of your finances.

Unless noted otherwise, I use each of the tools listed below:

Tools I Use

Empower

Update

Personal Capital is now called Empower, and the free tool is now called the Empower Personal Dashboard. Nothing about the tool has changed, and it's still free.

Empower is a comprehensive free financial management tool. It can do just about everything. You can connect your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts. Once you link your accounts, Empower can track your budget, cash flow, and upcoming bills. But it's much more than a budgeting app.

The app tracks your net worth over time. It also tracks all of your investments, including retirement and brokerage accounts. Empower then provides automated analysis of your asset allocation, investment fees, and retirement planning.

Empower also offers a high-yield cash account. It's FDIC-insured and offers a competitive rate.

I've used Empower for years. Based on my experience, I created a Empower Review and User's Guide if you want more details.

New Retirement

Unlike Personal Capital, New Retirement is a paid tool. It's worth every penny. In my opinion, it is the most robust retirement planning software available directly to consumers. You can use the tool to model everything from retirement spending to Roth conversions to social security and medicare premiums.

There is a learning curve to New Retirement, but it's worth the time and effort. They also give you a free 14-day trial to check it out.

You can also check out this Q&A session I held where we walked through many features of the software.

Wealthfront

Wealthfront is an automated investing service often referred to as a robo-advisor. It's similar in theory to a target date retirement fund, however, it gives you more control over your asset allocation. It also offers excellent tools to understand your investments.

Wealthfront also offers a high-yield cash account, which is what I use Wealthfront for. I don't use its robo-advisor services (see Betterment below).

I should add, however, that Wealthfront doesn't offer the absolute best rates. Today, the best deposit rate I can find is through SaveBetter. This company partners with FDIC-insured banks to allow its customers to pick and choose from multiple banks all through one account.

Vanguard

Vanguard is a mutual fund company that popularized index fund investing. You can set up just about any type of account, including IRAs and taxable accounts. From there, you can invest in target date retirement funds and low-cost index funds. I've used Vanguard's funds and brokerage services for years.

Fidelity

Fidelity also offers low-cost index funds and any account type you'd need. If I had to pick one broker to use, it would be Fidelity. There are several reasons for this:

  • Technology: Fidelity's website and app are easy to use and provide a wealth of information about your accounts and the markets.
  • Full View: Powered by eMoneyAdvisor, Full View is a free tool that enables you to track all of your accounts, including those held outside of Fidelity. While it doesn't compare to Personal Capital, in my opinion, it's still a useful tool.
  • Customer Service: I've never had a bad experience with Fidelity. No company is perfect, but Fidelity offers some of the best customer service I've experience with any investment platform.

Betterment

Betterment is a robo-advisor, similar to Wealthfront. They both offer a simple way to start investing, but they both do charge a fee. While the fee is modest, we know from Retire Before Mom and Dad that every basis point in fees costs us a lot of money over our lifetimes. Still, I think robo-advisors are a reasonable choice for those who want a service that can handle your asset allocation and rebalancing.

I use Betterment to invest our credit card rewards. You can check out my video on Betterment, which shows you my account and some of Betterment's features.

Portfolio Visualizer

This free tool is one of the best I've found at evaluating the historical performance of a portfolio. You can add specific investments (stocks, ETFs or mutual funds) and Portfolio Visualizer will return the historical returns of the portfolio along with a wealth of data (e.g., CAGR, standard deviation, worst drawdown). You can also evaluate portfolios using asset classes rather than specific investments.

Another feature I use is its Monte Carlo simulation. It's particularly useful for modeling retirement spending scenarios, like the 4% Rule.

Here's a video guide to Portfolio Visualizer.

FI Calc App

FI Calc is a free tool that models retirement spending based on a specific drawdown strategy. You can easily set your years in retirement, nest egg balance, first-year spending, and select one of several drawdown strategies. The tool also allows you to model other retirement income and one-time large expenditures.

The results, based on historical data, show by year (from 1926 to the present) whether your money would have lasted through retirement. Importantly, it also shows those years when you would have almost run out of money.

Morningstar

Morningstar is arguably the best source of information on stocks, mutual funds and ETFs. Enter a ticker and Morningstar returns a wealth of information including a fund's expense ratio, investing style, historical performance and volatility, and top investments.

Morningstar Investor is its new portfolio tracking tool. I'm still testing it, but my initial impression is that it is a step in the right direction but still needs a lot of work.

Tiller Money

Tiller Money combines an automated budgeting app with the power of a spreadsheet. Once you connect your bank and credit card accounts to Tiller, it downloads your transaction data and balances into either Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. From there you can evaluate and categorize your spending.

1Password

A password manager is a must. It enables you to use complex, lengthy passwords without have to remember them. I used LastPass for years, but after its data breach issues, I switched to 1Password. It's very easy to use, works on all my devices, and I can share passwords with anybody I choose without actually revealing the password to them.

Other Tools Worth Considering

YNAB

YNAB, short for You Need a Budget, is the budgeting tool I use every day. It automatically downloads all of your transactions from bank accounts (checking and savings), as well as credit cards. You can categorize your expenses, run reports, and understand where your money is going.

It is a subscription model, but the cost is reasonable. I've found it to be the best tool to manage your money.

Mint.com

I used Mint for many years. It's a free online money management tool. You connect your financial accounts to Mint. The app then downloads your transactions and categorizes them for you. It's not perfect, but it's right more often than not. You can then see where your money has gone and plan your budget going forward.

While Mint offers a decent product, there are some really good Mint alternatives worth checking out.

Filed Under: Tools

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