The TSP decided to change the way that they make the data available randomly since I originally made the script. The old version of the page looked like this:

It only allowed you to access 30 days at a time, and required more of a human-touch to gather all of the data. In order to navigate this, I had to request the data (and resulting page) 30 prices at a time. To load the whole database, this took a considerable amount of time. Read More

I’m a person that likes to keep track of their finances intently, along with someone that likes a lot of data and looking through that data. Unfortunately, these two desires start to fall apart once it gets to my retirement. As a federal employee, I have the “Thrift Savings Plan” for my funded retirement savings. The TSP is great in a lot of ways; for instance, it’s got expense ratios on it’s funds that are an order of magnitude lower than the lowest funds elsewhere (0.027%). It keeps these expense ratios low (along with the expenses to the government) by limiting a lot of things that you might find in other private retirement systems. For instance, we have only 5 funds to invest in, and another 5 “lifecycle” funds that invest in those 5 funds adjusting their allocations automatically.

One of the main things that bugs me about it, though, is that there’s no way to see the data. You get your quarterly statements to see your performance, but that’s about it. Unlike funds that you can find data for on Google Finance, you can’t see your TSP fund’s individual or combined performances during different periods. I can’t see how my retirement funds react as a whole to world news, economic cycles, or even compare it simply to my brokerage account or IRAs. Read More