When I am working with a new client for Luther Wealth, the first thing I do is make them count all their money. It sounds silly, but if you’ve had a few jobs, there’s a pretty good chance you have an old 401k laying around somewhere that you haven’t looked at in a while. In fact, in New York State alone, there is over $15.5 billion laying around in unclaimed, forgotten investment accounts. But the first step in creating a retirement plan is to figure out what you’re starting with.
It’s common for people to feel a little anxiety about this– we all know that we have some investment accounts that “we really should be paying attention to”, but it’s usually just one of those things that gets pushed to the back-burner. Fortunately, this isn’t the worst thing in the world! In fact, Fidelity found that of all their retirement accounts, the ones that performed the best were the ones that people had forgotten about!
Keeping track of your finances with apps
Even so, if you have a bunch of retirement accounts, you’d probably like to keep track of them. Going through the process of digging up logins for all of your old 401ks is a part of beginning the LWM advising process, but there are also many third party apps that help you do that on your own, and in conjunction with LWM advisory services.
Luther Wealth Management uses Interactive Brokers as our custodian bank for client assets and our primary securities broker. This helps keep our client fees extremely low, and helps to ensure clients get best execution on trades. It also means that we can benefit from Interactive Brokers’ integration with several 3rd party financial apps, including:
- Mint
- CashEdge
- TradeLog
- TurboTax
- Quicken Direct Connect
I am a big fan of Mint in particular. It is easy to use and lets you keep track of all of your bank accounts, credit cards, investments, and debts. It also allows you to perform monthly budgeting exercises and set financial goals for the future. It’s very useful! And even better, it can integrate your investments with Luther Wealth in a matter of minutes.
To pull your LWM investment data into any of these 3rd party apps, simply follow these steps:
- Log into your LWM account at Interactive Brokers
- Open the Menu at the top left of the screen
- Click on Settings – Account Settings
- Under “Reporting”, click on the gear icon next to “Third Party Services”
- Check the box next to the app you want to use
- Click “Save”
- You should now be able to copy a Token and Query ID
- Log into your Mint account (or one of the other 3rd party apps)
- Follow the app’s procedure to add a new account
- When prompted, enter the copied Token and Query ID
- Now your Luther Wealth investments will be viewable in your budgeting app!
Protecting your login credentials
You might notice that Luther Wealth / Interactive Brokers is a little different than most other accounts that you add to Mint or another 3rd party app. In most other cases, you add accounts by simply entering your login ID and password to your bank account into the 3rd party app. However, this is a little dodgy from a security perspective, because your bank login credentials end up being stored on a Mint server.
Interactive Brokers takes an extra step with Mint by setting up a separate set of 3rd party credentials (the Token and Query ID), to be used for read-only access by other apps. This way, you never have to send anyone, including Mint, credentials that could be used to steal your money stored with Luther Wealth and Interactive Brokers.
One last note– I have no affiliation or conflict of interest with Mint or other budgeting apps. I just think they’re cool.
Don’t miss out on future posts!
Don’t miss any new posts! Sign up below to subscribe. I generally post once per month and I alternate between longer-form articles and short digests of interesting financial content from other sites I’ve found. Thanks for reading!