These are all tools that I use to help me track my finances. I would recommend any of them.

Adjusted Cost Base

The free version of this tool is a bit of an eyesore due to the ads, but rest assured, it’s very useful. I use this tool to track the buys and sells in my non-registered accounts so I can accurately report capital gains and losses at tax time. It handles all the weirdness that can crop up too — stock splits, currency conversions, phantom distributions, return of capital….The paid version (which I have NOT used, full disclosure) automates some of the calculations, but my non-registered holdings are pretty simple. I used to do this in a spreadsheet. https://www.adjustedcostbase.ca/

Canada Stock Channel: Compound Returns Calculator

Shows the total return of any Canadian share or ETF assuming all dividends are reinvested. https://www.canadastockchannel.com/compound-returns-calculator/

Canadian Tax Calculators

This free resource has a lot of ads, but don’t let that prevent you from taking advantage of the excellent calculators found here. For people decumulating their retirement savings (like me), it’s an essential resource to minimize how much tax you’ll pay in a given year. https://www.taxtips.ca/canadian-financial-and-income-tax-calculators.htm

cFIREsim

cFIREsim (which stands for Crowdsourced Financial Independence and Retire Early Simulator) is a detailed tool to allow you to see how likely your retirement funds will last using 150-ish years of actual market data. A good way to get an indication of how close you are to retirement: https://www.cfiresim.com/.

CPP Calculator

This Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) calculator uses your actual contribution history to figure out what you can expect at age 60, 65 and (my preferred) 70. Very useful and more accurate than the estimate the feds generate. https://www.cppcalculator.com/

Dividend Channel: DRIP Returns Calculator

This tool has the same look and feel as this one, but supports both US and Canadian stocks/ETFs. For Canadian, add “.ca” to the symbol you’re interested in, but I don’t believe it does currency conversion if you do this. https://www.dividendchannel.com/drip-returns-calculator/

ETF Return Calculator

This is a handy tool to see TOTAL return (all dividends reinvested) of any US traded ETF. https://dqydj.com/etf-return-calculator/

Google Sheets

Since my personal computing environment is a mix of OSX, Linux and ChromeOS machines, I don’t have ready access to Excel. But I am a long-time Excel user thanks to my Windows-based career. So what to do? Google Sheets is the nearest thing in terms of look/feel/functionality I’ve ever seen to Excel, and its googlefinance() function allows me to build a (nearly) real-time portfolio tracker. With Google Sheets, I can access my trackers from any device, even my phone. https://workspace.google.com/intl/en_ca/products/sheets/

Google Sheets: Multi-Asset Tracker

This is a template I’ve used and refined over the years to track my own retirement portfolio and evaluate it against my own asset-allocation targets. Access it over here. View a brief demo of it on YouTube. If you have comments, questions or suggestions about this tool, please drop me a line at comments@moneyengineer.ca.

PERC

PERC (which stands for Personal Enhanced Retirement Calculator) uses the concepts from the excellent book Retirement Income for Life to provide a retirement calculator. Do you have enough? Maybe all you need to do is to reduce your management fees by becoming a DIY investor 😉 https://www.perc-pro.ca/

Valueinvesting.io backtesting

This is an extensive toolset, but I’ve only really looked at the backtesting tools over at https://valueinvesting.io/backtest-portfolio. They’re quite useful for (you guessed it) backtesting various portfolio ideas you may have; you can save portfolios if you register for a free account.

Yahoo Finance Portfolios

If you’re not so keen on building spreadsheets to track your financial life, then you might also consider Yahoo. Their portfolio builder has been recently revamped, and it’s pretty slick. https://finance.yahoo.com/portfolios/