I started my 401(k) account at WRI way back in January of 1994; I kept all the statements, through the end of 2005 (at which point they were improved so much that they no longer contained any useful information - number of shares, share prices, employer matching, that sort of thing).
I had the notion to enter all of it into Quicken, so I'd have the complete history of my 401(k) online. (One of my weirder hobbies is creating databases, then generating charts & graphs from them. It's the perfect pastime: it's fun, it doesn't cost anything, and there's nothing to clean up afterward.) First I needed to normalize the data: turn the gibberish on the statements into per-quarter figures for shares purchased, price paid, share price at end-of-quarter, employer contributions, etc., etc. That took a good chunk of the afternoon (Sam was napping). Tomorrow I can get started feeding the results to Quicken.
(I don't suppose an accountant would be very impressed with my data. It won't be a complete list of all the transactions that have occurred - things like reinvested dividends aren't on the statements, and there's no way to reconstruct them from the data provided - but it will be good enough for me.)
One interesting statistic: 55% of my balance (as of December 31, 2005) is from my own contributions; 16% is from employer matching; the remaining 29% is from rising share prices of the funds in which I'm invested. For every dollar I've put in, I now have $1.81. Figuring out the actual rate of return seems to require differential equations, a branch of mathematics I - alas - never learned. (All my friends took the diff-eq class in college; I saw their suffering and found some other way to meet the math requirements for a CS degree.)
Or not:
- 1 × (x ^ 12) = 1.81
- 12 × ln(x) = ln(1.81)
- ln(x) = ln(1.81) / 12, or 0.0494439
- x = e ^ 0.0494439, or 1.0506866
Does that mean I'm getting a 5% return? I suppose it would, if I had made my contributions in one lump sum on January 1, 1994; but I didn't.
Gah. Too much math, too late at night. Think more about this later, when I'm awake.