Where do expense ratios show up on my statement?
I don't think that you'll notice a difference in the NAV in a fund with fees that are low as the Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund. Their management fees are incorporated into the NAV, but keep in mind that the fund has a total of $144 billion in assets, with $66 billion in the investor class. The actual fees represent a tiny fraction of the NAV, and may only show up at all on the day they assess the fees. With Vanguard total stock market, you notice the fee difference in the distributions. In the example of Vanguard Total Stock Market, there are institutional-class shares (like VITPX with a minimum investment of $200M) with still lower costs -- as low as 0.0250% vs. 0.18% for the investor class. You will notice a different NAV and distributions for that fund, but there may be other reasons for the variation that I'm not familar with, as I'm not an institutional investor. For Vanguard: Vanguard does compare its fees with similar funds from its competitors on this tab, but then again, this is Vanguard giving you this information, so take with a grain of salt.
Giving out your bank account number is not generally a security problem.  The first time you write your landlord a security deposit or rent check, he'll have your account number.  (It's printed on the check.) That having been said, in my experience, banks do not generally give out balance information to just anyone who calls them up and gives them an account number.  Have you asked the landlord what he needs?  Perhaps showing him a printout of a recent bank statement is enough. "If you're willing to do a little more work and bookkeeping than just putting money into the 401(k) I would recommend the following. I note that you said you chose some funds based on performance since the expense ratios are all high. I would recommend against chasing performance because active funds will almost always falter; honor the old saw:  ""past performance is no guarantee of future returns"". Assuming the cash in your Ally account is an emergency fund, I would use it to pay off your credit card debt to avoid the interest payments. Use free cash flow in the coming months to bring the emergency fund balance back up to an acceptable level. If the Ally account is not an emergency fund, I would make it one! With no debt and an emergency fund for 3-12 months of living expenses (pick your risk tolerance), then you can concentrate on investing. Your 401(k) options are unfortunately pretty poor. With those choices I would invest this way: Once you fill up your choice of IRA, then you have the tougher decision of where to put any extra money you have to invest (if any). A brokerage account gives you the freedom of investment choices and the ability to easily pull out money in the case of a dire emergency. The 401(k) will give you tax benefits, but high fund expenses. The tax benefits are considerable, so if I were at a job where I plan on moving on in a few years, I'd fund the 401(k) up to the max with the knowledge that I'd roll the 401(k) into a rollover IRA in the (relatively) short term. If I saw myself staying at the employer for a long time (5+ years), I'd probably take the taxable account route since those high fund fees will add up over time. One you start building up a solid base, then I might look into having a small allocation in one of my accounts for ""play money"" to pick individual stocks, or start making sector bets." It depends on whether or not you are referring to realized or unrealized gains.  If the asset appreciation is realized, meaning you've sold the asset and actually collected liquidity from it, then Derek_6424246 has provided a good route to follow.   However, if the gains are unrealized, meaning only that the current value of the underlying asset(s) have increased or decreased, then you might want to record this under an Income:Unrealized Gains account.  One of the main distinctions between the two are whether or not you have a taxable event (realized) or just want to better track your net worth at a given time (unrealized).   For example, I generally track my retirement accounts increase in value sans interest, dividends and contributions, as income from an Income:Unrealized Gains account.  I can still reconcile it with my statements, and it shows an accurate picture for my net worth, but the money is not liquid nor taxed and is more for informational purposes than anything.   And no, I don't create an additional Expense account here to track losses.  Just think of Unrealized Gains as an income account where the balance will fluctuate up and down (and potentially even go negative) over time. The net return reported to you (as a percentage) by a mutual fund is the gross return minus the expense ratio.  So, if the gross return is X% and the expense ratio is Y%, your account will show a return of (X-Y)%.  Be aware that X could be negative too. So, with Y = 1, If X = 10 (as you might get from a stock fund if you believe historical averages will continue), then the net return is 9% and you have lost (Y/X) times 100% = 10% of the gross return. If X = 8 (as you might get from a bond fund if you believe historical averages will continue), then the net return is 7% and you have lost (Y/X) times 100% = 12.5% of the gross return. and so on and so forth.  The numbers used are merely examples of the returns that have been obtained historically, though it is worth emphasizing that 10% is an average return, averaged over many decades, from investments in stocks, and to believe that one will get a 10% return year after year is to mislead oneself very badly. I think the point of the illustrations is that expense ratios are important, and should matter a lot to you, but that their impact is proportionately somewhat less if the gross return  is high, but very significant if the gross return is low, as  in money-market funds.  In fact, some money market funds which  found that X < Y have even foregone charging the expense ratio  fee so as to maintain a fixed $1 per share price.  Personally,  I would need a lot of persuading to invest in even a stock fund with 1% expense ratio. "I think you misunderstand the purpose of the liability account.  I would suggest you review the standard accounting model, but to give you a brief overview: Income and expenses are money coming into and out of your possession.  They are the pipes flowing into and out of your ""box"".  Inside your box, you have assets (bank, savings, cash, etc) and liabilities (credit cards, unpaid debts, etc).  Money can flow into and out of either asset or liability accounts, for example: deposit a payment (income to asset), buy office supplies with cash (asset to expense), pay a bill with credit card (liability to expense), customer pays one of your debts directly (income to liability).  Paying off a debt with an asset does not affect your overall net worth, so paying a check to your credit card bill (asset to liability) doesn't decrease your total balance, it merely moves the value from one bucket to another. Now to your question: Mandatory payments, such as taxes or insurance (or for that matter, utilities, rent, food- all things that ""must"" be bought occasionally) are not liabilities, instead they are all expenses.  They might be paid FROM a liability account, if they are paid on credit for example, but the money still flows from liability to expense.  In my own records I have Expense:Taxes and Expense:Insurance, with sub-accounts in each.  Where the money comes from depends entirely on how I pay my bills, whether from cash or banks (asset) or whether it's a charge (liability).  Sometimes you receive payments back from an insurance company.  I find that rather than treating insurance premiums as a positive balance in a liability (with eventual payments as debits to the liability account), it is better to treat any payment from the insurance as income. Hope that helps!" "The Equity balance is your Assets (stuff you own) minus your Liabilities (debts you owe to others). It represents your ""net worth"" - how much money you would have when you would pay all your debts. When you want anything to show up in Equity, you need to make use of the asset and liability sheets. As long as you only manage Income and Expenses, your equity won't change. When you want to ""save"" money so the saved up money appears as an Asset and thus affecty your Equity, book it as an expense to your Cash or Bank asset account. For more information, check Chapter 3 of the GNUCash manual." Your account entries are generally correct, but do note that the last transaction is a mixture of the balance sheet and income statement.  If Quickbooks doesn't do this automatically then the expense must be manually removed from the balance sheet. The expense should be recognized on the balance sheet and income statement when it accrues, and it accrues when the prepaid rent is extinguished when consumed by the landlord, so that is when the second entry in your question should be booked. The cash flow statement will reflect all of these cash transactions immediately. "Here's a very basic MySQL query I put together that does what I want for  income/expense report. Basically it reports the same info as the canned income/expense report, but limits it those income/expenses associated with a particular account (rental property, in my case).  My main complaint is the output ""report"" is pretty ugly. And modifying for a different rental property requires changing the code (I could pass parameters etc). Again, the main ""issue"" in my mind with GnuCash income/expense report is that there is no filter for which account (rental property) you want income/expenses for, unless you set up account tree so that each rental property has its own defined incomes and expenses (i.e. PropertyA:Expense:Utility:electric).  Hopefully someone will point me to a more elegant solution that uses the report generator built into GnuCash. THanks! SELECT a2.account_type , a4.name, a3.name, a2.name, SUM(ROUND(IF(a2.account_type='EXPENSE',-  s2.value_num,ABS(s2.value_num))/s2.value_denom,2)) AS amt FROM    (     SELECT  s1.tx_guid     FROM    gnucash.accounts AS a1         INNER JOIN gnucash.splits AS s1 ON s1.account_guid = a1.guid     WHERE   a1.name='Property A'         ) AS X     INNER JOIN gnucash.splits s2 ON x.tx_guid = s2.tx_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.accounts a2 ON a2.guid=s2.account_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.transactions t ON t.guid=s2.tx_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a3 ON a3.guid = a2.parent_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a4 ON a4.guid = a3.parent_guid WHERE   a2.name <> 'Property A' # get all the accounts associated with tx in Property A account (but not the actual Property A Bank duplicate entries.         AND t.post_date BETWEEN CAST('2016-01-01' AS DATE) AND CAST('2016-12-31' AS DATE) GROUP BY a2.account_type ,a4.name, a3.name, a2.name  WITH ROLLUP ; And here's the output. Hopefully someone has a better suggested approach!"