Tracking CD Ladders

I was quite pleased that that one of my recent comments on Bargaineering.com was the impetus for a post.  It was a real revelation to me that Jim would say "everyone implies that your CD ladder is held at a single institution."  I've always thought quite that opposite that no one holds their CD ladder at a single institution, especially in the electronic age. 

Regardless of the assumption, my personal need to track my CD ladder across multiple banks has led me to develop a tool for keeping up with this.  I use it for tracking maturities, yields, beneficiaries and potential exceptions to FDIC insurance limitations (I wish this was a bigger problem for me!).

Given this, I maintain a tracking spreadsheet in google docs.  In addition to tracking the particulars of each CD, it also provides a visual representation of the CD ladder that makes the concept a bit easier to follow.

This tool has evolved over the years, It originated as a Lotus123 spreadsheet and later evolved to Excel and eventually google docs.  It also grew from simply tracking my CD ladder to covering each of the components of my overall financial strategy.

I use google docs to maintain this spreadsheet and my stock trading spreadsheet.  These have become two foundational components of my financial monitoring.  Needless to say, since these are on a public server, I don't keep any specific information like account numbers or login info in these docs.