Cancel Monarch Money. Use This Excel Workbook Instead.

The renewal moment

I migrated to Monarch when Mint shut down in 2024. Like a lot of people, I needed somewhere for my net worth chart to live. Monarch was $99/year then. By renewal time it was $179. The dashboard was still beautiful, the family-sharing UI was still nice, and I'd reconnected my Chase account for the fourth time that year because the Plaid link had silently broken — again.

That's when I noticed: I was paying $180/year for what amounted to a balance ledger that I had to keep manually re-authorizing. The "automation" was making me the customer-support rep for my own data.

I cancelled the renewal and built the workbook below. Six months later, my net worth chart is more accurate than Monarch's ever was — because I type 11 numbers into it on the last day of each month, and the file lives on my machine.

What Monarch actually does (the parts worth replacing)

Be fair to Monarch. It's a well-designed product that does five real things:

1. Aggregates account balances across banks, brokerages, credit cards, crypto exchanges, and real estate apps via Plaid + Yodlee + manual entry.
2. Tracks net worth over time with a longitudinal chart.
3. Categorizes transactions with AI/manual rules and shows monthly spending by category.
4. Tracks goals (emergency fund, house down payment, debt payoff) with progress bars.
5. Shares with a partner — both of you see the same view, both edit.

Items 1 and 2 (the net worth half) are trivially better in a spreadsheet — we'll show why below.

Items 3, 4, 5 are real value, but they're each handled by other purpose-built tools — and we'll address each one honestly, including the couple-sharing question, which is Monarch's strongest selling point.

The truth about Plaid bank linking

Plaid is the back-end service that lets apps like Monarch, Mint (RIP), Empower, YNAB, and Rocket Money read your bank balances and transactions. It's owned by Visa now, and it's pretty good — when it works.

The reality of being on the user side of a Plaid integration:

• Connections break when banks rotate auth flows. Chase, BofA, Wells Fargo, and the major brokerages update their login security regularly. Each update can invalidate your Plaid token. The first you'll hear about it is a "we couldn't refresh your accounts" email — usually several weeks after the actual breakage.
• 2FA codes don't always pass through. If your bank requires 2FA for new sessions and Plaid is trying to authenticate from a different IP, you get a stuck loop. The "fix" is to log out of your bank, reconnect manually through Plaid's web flow, and re-grant permissions.
• Read-only is read-only. Plaid can see balances; it can't see pending transactions immediately, can't see internal transfers between your own accounts accurately, can't categorize crypto, and routinely double-counts joint accounts.
• You're the customer-support rep for your own data. Monarch's support team can ping Plaid to investigate a broken connection, but the resolution is usually "log in again, click these 12 buttons, hope it works this time."

None of this is Monarch's fault — it's the inherent fragility of consent-based bank-data aggregation. But you're paying $180/year for it. And the "frictionless" experience the marketing promises is actually more friction than typing 11 numbers in a spreadsheet once a month, because the numbers don't lie or get stale or require re-authentication.

The net worth formula is one line of SUMIFS

The most-quoted dashboard metric in any personal finance app is your net worth. The math that produces it is genuinely one formula:

Net Worth = Σ(Asset balances on latest snapshot date)
          − Σ(Debt balances on latest snapshot date)

In Excel or Google Sheets, that's literally one SUMIFS line per side:

=SUMIFS(Balance, Date, MAX(Date), AssetOrDebt, "Asset")
 − SUMIFS(Balance, Date, MAX(Date), AssetOrDebt, "Debt")

Drop that into a cell. It returns your current net worth from a long-format snapshot log. Add new rows each month; the formula automatically uses the newest entries.

That's it. There's no magic in Monarch's net worth chart. It's SUMIFS on a server.

The Excel workbook that replaces Monarch's net worth half

The gridmoo Net Worth Tracker wires that formula into a working workbook designed for the once-a-month sit-down:

• Monthly Snapshots — long-format ledger. Columns: Snapshot Date, Account, Type (Cash / Investment / Crypto / Real Estate / Vehicle / Mortgage / Auto Loan / Credit Card / Student Loan), Asset/Debt, Balance, Prev Balance, Change $, Change %, Goal Linked, Verified, Source, Notes. One row per account per month. Add new rows as you snapshot.
• Accounts Setup — your accounts list. Configure once: Account Name, Type, Institution, Asset/Debt, Currency, Include in NW (yes/no), Opening Balance, Opening Date, Tax-Advantaged, Owner, Liquidity, Status.
• Net Worth Dashboard — four big KPIs (Current Net Worth, Total Assets, Total Debts, Asset:Debt Ratio) plus traffic-light status flags. All driven by the SUMIFS formula above.
• Settings & Targets — your target net worth, target asset:debt ratio, savings rate targets. The dashboard's "On Track / Watch / Action" flags read from here.
• Plus a Print Reports tab for sharing with a financial advisor or a spouse.

It ships with realistic sample data: 11 accounts across HSBC Checking, HSBC Savings, Vanguard Roth IRA, Fidelity 401k, Interactive Brokers, Coinbase BTC, primary residence, auto, Chase mortgage, Capital One auto loan, and an AmEx card. Two months of snapshot history so you can see how the change-tracking works before you replace with your own data.

See the Net Worth Tracker — $11 individually.
→ See the workbook

How it works in 30 seconds, once a month

1. Last day of the month, open the file.
2. Open each of your bank/brokerage/credit-card apps. Read the balance. (You'd be doing this anyway when Plaid breaks.)
3. For each account, append a row to Monthly Snapshots: today's date, account name (autocomplete), balance.
4. The Change $ and Change % columns auto-compute against last month's snapshot.
5. Glance at the Net Worth Dashboard. Done.

Total time for 11 accounts: about 4 minutes the first time, 90 seconds once you've done it twice and remember the muscle memory of which app shows you what.

That's the entire monthly loop. No Plaid breakage, no re-auth, no "we couldn't reach Chase." You opened your bank app to read the balance — you'd be doing that anyway.

The couple-sharing question (Monarch's strongest selling point)

If you and a partner share finances, Monarch's family dashboard is genuinely good. Both of you see the same balances and trends, both can comment, both can update goals.

You can do all of that for free in Google Sheets:

• Upload the .xlsx file to Google Drive. Open as a Sheet. Share with your partner via email link.
• Both edit concurrently. Sheets handles concurrent cell edits with author colors and revision history, in a way that's actually more transparent than Monarch's "Made an update" notifications.
• Threaded comments at the cell level. Click a cell, hit Insert Comment, your partner gets emailed.
• Free, forever. No per-user seat charge.

The "couples app" framing is a wrapper around a feature any shared file in Google Drive has had since 2006. You're paying $180/year for the wrapper.

What you actually lose by switching (the honest part)

Be fair. Monarch does some things this workbook does not:

• Automatic balance refresh. When Plaid works, balances refresh nightly. In the spreadsheet, you refresh manually once a month. If you actively want a daily-updating balance ticker, Monarch wins. If you don't actually look daily, you're paying for refresh frequency you don't use.
• Transaction-level categorization. Monarch shows monthly spending by category, line-by-line. The Net Worth Tracker is about balances, not transactions. For transaction-level budgeting, our free Daily Budget Planner handles it — same architecture, different focus.
• Mobile-first interface. Monarch's iOS app is beautiful. A spreadsheet on a phone is functional but not pretty. We're honest that this is for desktop sit-down work.
• Goals UI with progress animations. The workbook's Settings & Targets tab tracks targets and shows on-track/behind flags. It doesn't have animated progress bars or push notifications.
• Auto-discovery of new accounts. If you open a new credit card and link it to Plaid, Monarch finds it automatically. In the workbook, you add a row to Accounts Setup. Takes 20 seconds.

If automatic refresh + transaction categorization + mobile + animations is collectively worth $180/year to you, Monarch is the right choice. For the substantial fraction of users who actually open Monarch once a month to look at the net worth chart and dismiss the notifications — the spreadsheet is the honest answer.

The case for monthly snapshots over constant tracking

The dirty secret of every personal finance dashboard: daily tracking doesn't change your behavior. Monthly tracking does.

If you check your net worth daily, you'll notice it dropped $4,000 and panic when actually the market dropped 1% on a $400k portfolio. You'll notice it rose $4,000 and feel rich when actually the market just bounced. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible, and the emotional load is real.

The monthly snapshot is the right cadence for net worth. You see actual progress. You see your savings contributions compound. You catch the gradual debt paydown. The noise filters out. Behavior change happens.

Apps that push you toward daily checking are optimizing for engagement (you opening the app), not for your financial health. A spreadsheet that you open on the last day of each month is optimizing for the right thing.

What this workbook is not

Honesty earns trust:

• It is not bank-linked. You manually type 11 numbers a month.
• It is not a transaction tracker. For that, use the free Daily Budget Planner.
• It is not a phone app. Best on desktop, viewable read-only on phone via Google Sheets / Numbers.
• It does not pull live stock or crypto prices into account balances (those are point-in-time snapshots — for live portfolio valuation, see Investment Portfolio Tracker with GOOGLEFINANCE).
• It is not a financial planner. It tracks where you are; it doesn't tell you what to do.

If you want real-time, app-native, daily-pinging tools — Monarch is the better fit and we'll say that. If you want a clean net worth ledger you own and update once a month, this workbook is the answer.

One workbook, then a whole operating system

The Net Worth Tracker is one of seven workbooks in the gridmoo personal finance catalog. Together they cover the full personal finance stack that you'd otherwise rent month-by-month:

• Daily Budget Planner — 24-tab budgeting workbook (replaces YNAB, ~$15/mo) — this one is free
• Net Worth Tracker — the workbook this post is about (replaces Empower / Monarch, ~$15–20/mo)
• Debt Payoff Planner — snowball vs avalanche strategy comparison (replaces Undebt.it Pro / YNAB, ~$12/mo)
• Investment Portfolio Tracker — holdings + transactions with GOOGLEFINANCE price refresh (replaces Sharesight, ~$19/mo)
• Sinking Funds Planner — envelope budgeting for irregular expenses (replaces Goodbudget Plus, ~$8/mo)
• Savings Goal Tracker — multi-goal progress tracker (replaces the goals module in most apps, ~$15/mo)
• Subscription & Bill Tracker — annual cost surfacing + non-essential flagging (replaces Rocket Money Premium, ~$12/mo)

All seven workbooks together replace roughly $101/mo — that's $1,212/yr — of personal finance app subscriptions. Each workbook is $7–$19, paid once.

The decision

Monarch is a beautiful product. If you and your partner genuinely use it daily, value the mobile experience, don't mind the recurring re-auth ritual, and feel $180/year is fair for the convenience — that's a defensible call.

But if you opened a renewal email and thought "I really only look at this once a month, and half the time the Chase connection is broken anyway" — try the spreadsheet for two months. Type 11 numbers each month-end. See whether your behavior actually changes (or stays the same as Monarch, but $180 cheaper).

You can get the Net Worth Tracker for $11. Or browse the full catalog for other Excel workbooks that replace specific SaaS subscriptions.

Want to feel what these workbooks are like before you buy? Download the free Daily Budget Planner — same architecture, same once-a-month-or-less rhythm, no card required.

And if you want to see the exact dollar impact of every personal finance app you currently pay for — Monarch, Empower, Sharesight, YNAB, Rocket Money, Goodbudget, all of them — the SaaS Tax Calculator will give you a number you'll want to share with your partner.