Portfolio tracking becomes a real challenge once your investments are spread across several accounts, and that is exactly the problem David was facing as he approached retirement.
The Situation
David spent his career moving between employers, and like many investors, his accounts followed him along the way. By the time he started thinking seriously about retirement, his holdings were scattered across four separate accounts.
He had a personal brokerage account which he opened years earlier. He also had a Vanguard brokerage account he used for additional investing outside of retirement plans. On top of that, he had a Vanguard IRA that had started life as a 401k rollover from an old employer, and a Fidelity 401k from the corporate job he had most recently left.
Four accounts, two custodians, and a mix of account types. Each one had its own login, its own statements, and its own way of presenting information.
The Problems
As retirement got closer, David ran into several issues with trying to get a complete picture of his holdings.
The first problem was knowing what his total net worth and asset allocation were. Without a combined view, David had no easy way to tell how much of his overall portfolio was in stock, mutual funds and ETFs. He also had no way of knowing his entire net-worth.
The second problem was performance. David wanted to know whether his investments were actually doing well, not just in isolation but compared to the broader market. Checking that meant benchmarking his returns against the Dow Jones, the Nasdaq, or the S&P 500 indexes, which was nearly impossible to do when his holdings lived in four different systems with four different reporting formats.
The third problem was record keeping. Between the brokerage account, the Vanguard accounts, and the Fidelity 401k, David had a mix of short-term and long-term gains, along with dividends that were sometimes reinvested and sometimes not. Keeping this straight by hand, using downloaded statements and a homemade spreadsheet, was tedious and prone to error.
Finally, there was the retirement income question. David needed a realistic sense of what income his portfolio might produce once he stopped working.
How EquityStat Helped
David added all four accounts into EquityStat, which gave him a single consolidated view of his entire portfolio for the first time. He no longer had to log into separate investment accounts just to understand his overall allocation.
For performance, EquityStat let David compare his investment returns directly against benchmarks like the Dow Jones, Nasdaq, and the S&P 500. That comparison told him whether his accounts were genuinely performing well or simply riding a rising market, something he could never confidently answer before he started using EquityStat.
For recordkeeping, David entered his transactions into EquityStat, including short-term capital gains, long-term capital gains, and dividends, along with the reinvested amounts of each. When a re-invested dividend or re-invested capital gain was paid, he recorded it, so his share counts and cost basis stayed accurate across every account.
EquityStat’s Portfolio Analysis page gave David a graph of dividends received over time, viewable at both the account level and across individual portfolios. It also showed him dividends year-to-date, dividends for the current quarter, expected dividends, and total dividends, all broken out by account or by portfolio. That gave him part of his retirement income picture, alongside the allocation and performance data.
He also turned on cash transaction tracking so that dividends he chose not to reinvest would deposit automatically into cash within EquityStat, keeping his records aligned with what was actually happening in his accounts.
The Result
Instead of juggling four logins, a spreadsheet, and guessing how his investments stacked up against the market, David now has one place where he can see his full allocation, measure his performance against major benchmarks, keep his capital gains and dividend records straight, and estimate his retirement income with real confidence.
For investors like David, the value is not just convenience. It is having a complete and accurate picture at a moment when that picture matters most.