Update balances and understand Balance History

A projection begins with a dated picture of what you own and owe

Update Balances creates today’s Home snapshot of accounts, property, and debt. That snapshot establishes the starting values for later projections and gives Balance History a series of comparable observations. Property valuation dates and debt statement dates remain visible as separate source dates, so an older source does not silently backdate the household record.

Balance History can answer two different questions. Retirement funding focuses on investable accounts that may support spending. Net worth adds property and other assets and subtracts liabilities. A home the household intends to keep may strengthen net worth without supplying retirement cash, so the two views should not be treated as interchangeable.

Update when the starting point has become meaningfully stale

Update after a substantial contribution, withdrawal, purchase, sale, rollover, debt change, or ordinary review interval. You do not need to create a new planning version for every market day. The useful frequency is the one that keeps decisions grounded in reasonably current values without encouraging reactions to ordinary noise.

Distinguish quoted holdings from assets that require a manual valuation. A missing or unavailable quote is not evidence that a holding is worth zero. Property, private investments, debt, and unusual securities deserve an explicit review and an honest source date instead of inheriting a false sense of freshness from market-priced holdings.

Home owns the continuing balance history. Updating prices inside a What-if should remain part of that experiment and should not rewrite the historical record of the plan you maintain.

Review the snapshot before preserving it

If Dashboard says Refine estimated account balances, replace the unidentified Plan Setup placeholders in Scenario Editor. A specific holding name, ticker, or CUSIP ends that setup reminder; a temporary total value may still need a current price before the next dated snapshot.

The Home snapshot date is fixed to today. Review the separate source date for each property value and debt statement, then confirm quantities, prices, account assignments, property values, and outstanding debt. Correct the underlying holding or account when the structure is wrong; do not use a manual total merely to conceal a quantity or classification problem.

After fetching current prices, you can still sort the holdings table and revise any price or direct account balance. Market values and Estimated investment change update immediately from those manual entries so you can review the complete draft before saving.

Ticker not found means no current price matched that ticker; it is not a system error. The saved manual price remains in place. Save the update to skip the unchanged ticker during automatic updates, edit the ticker to clear the status, or use Fetch / retry current prices to try again explicitly.

Save the completed Home snapshot only after the account totals reconcile. If weekly automatic updates are enabled, supported quoted holdings may receive the scheduled price refresh, but manually valued assets, property, debt, and unsupported securities still require judgment. Automatic pricing does not make the entire household balance sheet current.

When weekly updates are enabled, the Saturday-morning job applies prices collected after the final weekday market refresh. The Update Balances page provides an Account Settings link to turn the preference on or off. That schedule still does not update property, debt, or manually priced values.

Use Balance History filters deliberately. Begin with investable retirement funding when judging the resources available to support spending. Add property and liabilities when the question is household net worth or estate context.

Explain a change before treating it as progress or decline

Compare adjacent snapshots and ask what produced a large movement. Contributions, withdrawals, transfers, purchases, sales, reclassification, newly added accounts, debt payoff, and market movement can all change the line. Balance History records the result; it does not automatically attribute the cause.

Retirement funding history shows the investable portfolio by default. Property is not retirement funding unless the plan includes a sale or equity-access strategy, and debt is shown below zero when selected. Those display choices explain why the history total may differ from the net-worth figure on the Dashboard.

Look for duplicate dates, missing accounts, stale manual values, and a shift caused solely by switching between retirement-funding and net-worth views. Reopen the saved snapshot and reconcile it with the same dated source before relying on a trend.

After a material balance update, rerun analyses that depend on the starting portfolio. An old stochastic result does not become current merely because the Dashboard can show the new balance.

A What-If price update creates a new version of that What-if without changing Home balances or Balance History. Confirm which scenario is open before saving a price experiment.

Balance History is not an investment-performance report

The history shows nominal saved values. It does not calculate time-weighted or money-weighted return, separate deposits from market gains, measure fees, or prove that an investment strategy outperformed. A rising line can be caused by contributions; a falling line can be caused by planned retirement spending.

Use brokerage and lender records for transaction-level reconciliation and performance reporting. Use YARCalc’s history to keep the retirement starting point and broad funding trend understandable.