How Many Accounts Might a Person Have
To accomplish fast ledger updates, it helps to understand how many “real-world” accounts we need to import transactions for in each session. To know this, we ask: how many “real-world” accounts might a typical person have? “Typical” is hard to pin down. Economic status, country, marital/family status, age, and employment history are factors. Here are the main categories of accounts I deal with:
Banking
- One checking account, and one savings account each, per individual. And possibly a joint account
Credit Cards
One might hold multiple credit cards in order to:
- maximize rewards
- keep airline miles from expiring
- get discounted groceries
- use benefits such as extended warranty or auto rental insurance
- get reasonable currency exhange rates on international travel
Investment Accounts
- Taxable account (individual and joint)
- Retirement accounts
- Traditional IRA
- Roth
Employer Associated Accounts
This is where it gets complicated, because many people end up with several of these for each employer they have worked for. Some can be consolidated, and others cannot:
- Retirement accounts (401k, 403b, 401a, etc.)
- Pension accounts
- Equity (ESPP/RSU)
- Pre-tax health accounts: HSA, FSA
- Commuter
Paychecks
- These are not accounts per se, but need to be treated as such for importing
Shopping
- Want rich data about your shopping habits at Amazon.com, including categories, returns, etc.?
eBay, Paypal, Personal Payment
- Self explanatory
Airline Miles
- One account per airline, per individual Airline miles can be significant amounts of money and some expire, annoyingly, if not kept active.
Here is approximately how many I have:
| Category | Num | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Banking | 6 | checking (2), savings (2), joint (1), “safety” (1) |
| Credit Cards | 12 | Rewards, Miles, Store, International |
| Investment Accounts | 8 | individual (2), joint (1), tIRA (2), Roth (3) |
| Employer Associated | 11 | Retirement (5), ESPP (2), RSU (1), HSA (2), Commuter (1) |
| Paychecks | 1-2 | |
| Airline Miles | 12 | Airlines, hotels |
| Misc | 8 | eBay (2), Paypal(2), Personal Payment (4) |
| Shopping | 2 | Amazon (2) |
| Total | 61 | Whoa! That is a lot of accounts! |
A Note On Simplifying
Minimizing the number of accounts (or even the number of institutions) one has helps far more than writing software to rein in unnecessary complexity. Ways to accomplish this:
- consolidation
- setting a minimum threshold for account to be tracked (eg: consciously choosing to not track any account worth under 100 USD or 1000 EUR or such)