Questions about My Portfolio

What does My Portfolio do?

My Portfolio is an Australian household wealth tracker. It holds what you own, what you owe, what comes in and what goes out, and reports three things from them: your net position, how much of your spending is covered by passive income, and what you save each fortnight or month.

Every figure in it is one a member of the household typed. My Portfolio fetches nothing — not a bank balance, not a share price, not a property valuation. It performs arithmetic on your own numbers and shows its working.

Is My Portfolio free?

Yes, entirely. Every feature is free. There is no paid plan to buy, no trial that ends, and no paywall in front of anything in the app.

That includes exporting your own figures, which is the feature people most expect to be charged for. It is free and it stays free.

Does My Portfolio connect to my bank?

No. My Portfolio has never connected to a bank and there is nowhere in the app to hand over a bank login. It does not use Open Banking, it does not read your transactions, and it does not fetch share prices or property values from anywhere.

You enter your own figures. That is the point of the product, not a shortcoming of it: there is no consent screen to authorise, no data-sharing arrangement to sign, and no third party holding a key to your accounts. It also means you can open the app and start on the same day, without waiting for a bank to connect.

Do I have to record every transaction?

No. My Portfolio is not a transaction tracker. You record standing lines — the mortgage, the power bill, the wage, the rent — and update a line when it changes. You do not enter the milk.

Adding an expense is a tap on a category, a tap on the bill, and the amount. There are 144 names to tap, taken from Australian household bills rather than a generic list: council rates, strata fees, body corporate, registration, BAS payments, Foxtel. Typing a name is the escape hatch for something the list does not cover, not the normal way in.

Is My Portfolio financial advice?

No. My Portfolio does arithmetic on figures you entered. It never tells you what to buy, sell or borrow, it never tells you whether you are on track, and it does not recommend any financial product.

Emerald Websites, which publishes My Portfolio, does not hold an Australian Financial Services Licence, and the app is built so that it does not need one. Choosing what your screens lead with — property, passive income or budgeting — changes the order of your own figures and nothing else. It is never the app forming a view about your position.

Does My Portfolio forecast or project what I will have later?

No. Nothing in My Portfolio is drawn past the last figure entered. There is no growth rate, no compounding, no inflation assumption and no calendar anywhere in the app, and the charts stop at the most recent saved position rather than continuing as a trend line.

That is deliberate. A calculator that projects what an investment will return is regulated, and meeting ASIC’s conditions for generic calculators would mean carrying a set of assumptions and disclosures this product has chosen to avoid by not making the claim at all.

The one calculator My Portfolio does have takes the gap between your passive income and your spending and divides it by an amount you type in yourself. It answers how many periods that is. It does not name a year, and it does not assume a return.

Does My Portfolio tell me how much I can borrow?

No, and it is not going to. My Portfolio shows available equity on a property — 80% of the value you entered, less what you owe against it — because 80% is the conventional ceiling above which lenders mortgage insurance usually applies. It is arithmetic on two numbers you typed and nothing more.

It is not what any lender will advance. That depends on income, expenses, interest rates and a serviceability assessment the app does not perform. Telling someone what they can borrow is credit assistance and requires an Australian Credit Licence, so My Portfolio never pairs that figure with a lender, a rate, a product or a suggestion to refinance.

What does coverage mean in My Portfolio?

Coverage is how much of your recorded spending is paid for by passive income — income that arrives whether or not you work, such as rent, dividends, distributions or interest. A wage is not passive income and is not counted towards coverage.

My Portfolio shows coverage as a percentage of total expenses, and lists your own bills cheapest first with each one marked as your passive income reaches it. It also names the next bill within reach and what more per period it would take to cover it.

Coverage is always rounded down and a shortfall is always rounded up. The app rounds against itself in both directions, so no figure on the screen is more flattering than the arithmetic supports.

What if I do not know a figure?

Leave it blank. A blank is never counted as zero in My Portfolio.

A line you have named but not put a figure to is left out of every total that would include it, and the app reports how many lines it left out. That count is tappable and lists them by name, so you can see exactly what is missing rather than being asked to trust a number you cannot check.

This holds everywhere. An asset with no value is absent from your net position. An expense with no amount is absent from the coverage sum. A property loan with a repayment but no interest rate cannot be split into interest and principal, so its interest is left out and the screen says how many loans that applies to. In each case the app tells you what it excluded instead of assuming a zero.

What does My Portfolio show about my properties?

Across the whole property portfolio it shows what it is worth, what is owed against it, your equity, your available equity, and what the portfolio costs to hold each period after rent.

For each property it shows gross and net yield, and splits the loan repayment into interest and principal so you can see how much of it adds to your equity. An offset account can be linked to the loan it offsets, and that balance is taken off before the interest is worked out.

Every one of those figures is arithmetic on numbers the household entered. No property value is estimated, indexed or looked up, and yields are rounded down so they are never overstated.

Does My Portfolio work on iPhone, Android and in a browser?

All three. The web app runs at app.myportfolioapp.com.au in any current browser with nothing to install, and there are iPhone and Android apps on the App Store and Google Play.

It is one account across all three and the same figures wherever you sign in. You can sign in with an email address and password, with Google or with Apple, and you can add two-step verification with an authenticator app from More, under Sign-in and security.

Open the web app

Can my partner and I share one portfolio?

Yes. A household shares one portfolio and both people see everything in it. There is no partial view, no read-only member and no figure that is visible to one of you and hidden from the other.

The owner sends an invitation from More. The invitation is a one-time secret link rather than an email address, so nobody can join your household by registering an address they know. Invitations can be revoked, and a member can be removed, from the same screen.

What each person’s screens lead with is stored per person, not per household. Two people sharing one portfolio can look at the same figures in different orders — one leading with property, the other with passive income or with budgeting.

Is My Portfolio built for Australia?

Yes, and specifically. Amounts can be entered weekly, fortnightly, monthly or yearly and shown fortnightly or monthly, because wages here are fortnightly and bills are monthly and picking one would push the conversion onto the household.

The expense names are Australian household bills — council rates, strata fees, body corporate, land tax, registration, BAS payments, PAYG instalments — rather than an overseas list with the spelling changed. My Portfolio is built and run by Emerald Websites in Emerald, Queensland.

Can I use My Portfolio for my tax?

No. My Portfolio is not a tax tool. It is not connected to the ATO, it does not calculate tax, apply depreciation or work out capital gains, and it does not produce anything you can lodge.

What it can do is hold what you paid — there is a Tax category with ATO payments, BAS payments and PAYG instalments among the names you can tap — and hand the lot back as spreadsheets you can give to your accountant. The tax work is still theirs.

Does My Portfolio work offline?

Mostly. The app keeps a copy of your figures on your own device, so it opens and shows your numbers with no connection, and anything you enter while offline is saved and sent when you are back on.

A connection is needed the first time you sign in on a device, and from time to time afterwards to refresh that sign-in. Note that the offline copy is one more reason to remove the app from a phone you no longer use.

Can I get my figures out of My Portfolio?

Yes — free, at any time, and without asking anyone. Open More and choose Export your figures. You get five files: a spreadsheet each for your assets, debts, income and expenses, and a JSON file holding everything together.

The files carry the figures you entered and the links between them. They do not carry anything the app worked out for you, such as coverage, yield or equity, because the app’s arithmetic changes when its rules change and your own figures do not. A line you named but never put a figure to comes out as an empty cell, never as a zero.

The export has never been behind a paywall and will not be put behind one. Leaving should not cost money.

How secure is my information?

Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication and we never see or store your password. Everything travels between your device and Google over an encrypted connection, and Google encrypts it again where it is stored. Two-step verification with an authenticator app is available from More, under Sign-in and security.

The database refuses everything by default. To read or change anything you have to be signed in, and the server has to confirm you are a member of that portfolio — checked against the portfolio record itself, not taken on the app’s word. Membership can only be changed by our own server-side code, never by the app on someone’s phone.

Here is the honest limit. My Portfolio is not end-to-end encrypted. We hold the keys, which means we can reach your figures through the administration console, and so could anyone who compromised that access. That is true of almost every app of this kind, and any app that tells you otherwise while offering you a password reset should be read carefully.

The app carries no advertising identifiers, no advertising or marketing software, and no analytics or crash-reporting tools. We do not sell your figures and we do not use them to advertise to you.

Read the privacy policy

What happens if I delete my account?

Deleting your account is permanent and it cannot be undone. You can do it yourself from More, under Delete my account, or you can email and ask us to do it. Your sign-in record goes immediately and your figures usually follow within a minute or two.

If you are the only person in your portfolio, the portfolio goes with your account: every asset, liability, income source and expense in it. If somebody else is still a member, the figures stay, because they are that person’s household records too. You come off the portfolio, your name and email come out of it, and ownership passes to whoever has been a member the longest.

Some things survive by their nature, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise: purchase and receipt records held by Apple and Google, short-term backup copies of the database kept so it can be restored after a failure, server logs that note an account was deleted and when, and the copy on your own phone until you delete the app as well.

If you want to keep your figures, export them before you delete. Once the deletion runs there is nothing left for anyone to send you.

Full account deletion instructions