Anyone manage their personal finances by spreadsheet?

[CycloneDaddy]

This is the kind of stuff they should teach in high school instead of calculus, etc. Basic money management. So many people are clueless about where they stand financially.

Parents should be teaching their kids this basic stuff.

Im on a computer all day so no spreadsheets for me as I can see all my accounts online. Maybe once a year I put everything together and forecast what I will have at retirement just to make sure Im trending in the right direction.

 

[StratCY]

None of the apps out there seem to do precisely what I want them to, so I use a spreadsheet. I have one for a simple budget, one for some loans I am working on, and one for long term goals to help my wife and I stay on track. We're "kind of" doing the Dave Ramsey thing and have paid off nearly $18k over the last 9 months, so the spreadsheets are working. The big goal is to get TF out of TX and back to the midwest in the next 3-4 years, and the spreadsheets are the best way for us to track our progress.

 

[harimad]

There hasn't been a good personal finance thread in awhile so I thought I'd start one. There's a whole host of good apps and web sites out there to manage your money, but to this day I still use my own spreadsheet to do the job? Anyone else do the same?

I think there are a few reasons why I continue to do this even though it is almost certainly more work.

1. Apps come and go and I'm hesitant to invest time to learn a new system that could be shut down or try to upsell me on something I don't want.
2. There's a "black box" quality to a lot of these web sites where you plug numbers in and it returns results to you, but the assumptions or methodologies are hard to decipher. I want to see how they get from Point A to Point B, but often that is proprietary.
   
3. Entering my own data, building my own budget, etc. forces me to engage with it in a way that a web site wouldn't.
4. It's free; I pay a modest sum for a few version of Office every few years but that's it.

There are a lot of decent finance templates out on the web too, but I've mostly just built my own. I've had a day-to-day financial management spreadsheet for 20+ years, but more recently I've built a college savings calculator/manager and I'm working on a retirement sheet.

Ideas/tips/tricks welcome.

I use a bullet journal.

 

[harimad]

This is the kind of stuff they should teach in high school instead of calculus, etc. Basic money management. So many people are clueless about where they stand financially.

Not really. The kids who are taking calculus in high school are the ones who need it for college. I think most kids are tapping out at algebra.

 

[CascadeClone]

Parents should be teaching their kids this basic stuff..

I don't disagree on principle, but in my experience, 50% of parents are clueless/hopeless about personal finance and money. And 30% are worse - just plain foolish/dangerous with personal finance. And that's employed, two-parent families with some money and time. I know a guy who has made $100k plus for 30 years, and has less than $100k saved for retirement!!

I think we need some kind of life-skills classes, used to be called home economics. Maybe if the high schools can't manage it, do it on the side via private groups or community colleges, like drivers ed classes. Give HS credit, pay $100 or something for it. Just an idea.

 

[coolerifyoudid]

This is the kind of stuff they should teach in high school instead of calculus, etc. Basic money management. So many people are clueless about where they stand financially.

I'd change "instead of" to "in addition to". Otherwise, I agree.

 

[SCNCY]

I think we need some kind of life-skills classes, used to be called home economics. Maybe if the high schools can't manage it, do it on the side via private groups or community colleges, like drivers ed classes. Give HS credit, pay $100 or something for it. Just an idea.

My high school, even back in 2006, required every senior to take an econ class prior to graduation. While we learned the basics of economics for several weeks, most of the class was personal finance. What and how do IRAs, Mortgages, Credit, Insurance, etc. work. High schools should be very capable of doing it. Having said that, like all education, parents need to be the drivers to ensure their children are applying what they are learning. Parents are ultimately responsible for their child, everyone else is just part of the team.

 

[Trice]

This is the kind of stuff they should teach in high school instead of calculus, etc. Basic money management. So many people are clueless about where they stand financially.

People always say this, but there's a lot of research in recent years that suggests mandatory financial literacy in high school and college isn't effective.

But that's a topic for another thread.

 

[Trice]

So, I guess I'll be the one to ask what everyone who visits this thread is probably thinking:

Anyone actually willing to share their custom spreadsheets?

If not, that's cool.

I could, but it would take a lot of work to anonymize it. Plus I'm working on improving its usability for less manual data entry.

But I can tell you what's in it. I have separate tabs for:

• Credit cards - I pay as much as possible on credit cards for rewards. I post/track transactions here
  
• Checking - just like a checkbook registry but it also includes all future activity for the year (linked from my budget tab)
• Money market - same as my checking tab
• Money market subaccounts - I split my money market account into subaccounts where I save for irregular items like vacations or the annual insurance bill. I track those here
• Pay - paycheck tracking
• Budget - current and forecasted future budgets
• Tracking - my budget for each month vs. expenses for each month, and the variance
• Net worth - tracked every 6 months
• Home loan/auto loan amortization schedules
• Auto mileage tracking and maintenance log
• Flex spending account tracking
• Utility tracking
• Taxes: withholding calculator and rough calculations of my taxes for the year
  
• Notes - change log of past changes I've made to the spreadsheet, notes to myself about future changes to make, or everything I need to do to get next year's spreadsheet ready, etc.
• I'm looking at adding a dashboard type of tab to better compare certain metrics from year to year, as well as a tab listing all of our accounts

I have separate workbooks for 1) all different types of insurance, and 2) savings goals including college and retirement.

 

[KCClone1]

Not really. The kids who are taking calculus in high school are the ones who need it for college. I think most kids are tapping out at algebra.

Calculus was a bad example, but they need to find a way to teach some basic finance.

 

[TheHelgo]

Long time spreadsheet guy myself. I tried Mint a few years back and hated it.

Spreadsheet consists of Income, Expenses, Investments and Cash Flow (i.e the $ Amount I am able to allocate to savings/discretionary investments on a monthly basis after expenses). Once you do this for a full calendar year, you are able to lock down annual expectations and ultimately forecast expected retirement dates, education $ for kids, etc. Honestly, I view tracking by spreadsheet to be much easier than the online systems. Mint (IMO), for instance, was garbage and took way more effort than necessary. This was 3 years or so ago, so maybe Mint is better now.

 

[1100011CS]

So, I guess I'll be the one to ask what everyone who visits this thread is probably thinking:

Anyone actually willing to share their custom spreadsheets?

If not, that's cool.

Personally, I just use Mint but a person on redit posted what looks like a really good one:

 

[Kami6348]

There hasn't been a good personal finance thread in awhile so I thought I'd start one. There's a whole host of good apps and web sites out there to manage your money, but to this day I still use my own spreadsheet to do the job? Anyone else do the same?

I think there are a few reasons why I continue to do this even though it is almost certainly more work.

1. Apps come and go and I'm hesitant to invest time to learn a new system that could be shut down or try to upsell me on something I don't want.
2. There's a "black box" quality to a lot of these web sites where you plug numbers in and it returns results to you, but the assumptions or methodologies are hard to decipher. I want to see how they get from Point A to Point B, but often that is proprietary.
   
3. Entering my own data, building my own budget, etc. forces me to engage with it in a way that a web site wouldn't.
4. It's free; I pay a modest sum for a few version of Office every few years but that's it.

There are a lot of decent finance templates out on the web too, but I've mostly just built my own. I've had a day-to-day financial management spreadsheet for 20+ years, but more recently I've built a college savings calculator/manager and I'm working on a retirement sheet.

Ideas/tips/tricks welcome.

 

[Kami6348]

While I would agree that you can do what you want with a spreadsheet I think there are real advantages to using an app. There are really 3 out there that standout. Quicken, Mint and Personal Finance. They will all import from all of your accounts -- bank accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, credit cards, etc. This saves you the time to enter all your transactions. They will guess at what category the transactions should be charged to and most of the time the guess will be correct. Sometimes the guess will be off and once you correct one transaction it will remember the correct category for the future.

I use Personal Capital. It has the Instream Monte Carlo built in. This may not mean much to most. It's a very powerful retirement planner that is used by many of the top financial planning firms.

All of these will let you quickly see your asset allocation and provide a personal balance sheet along with details of your spending. All of the transactions can be exported to a csv file. I do this annually to help prepare some reports for my wife to review.

We live in Canada for 4+ months annually. Here I used Mint as it allows import of my Canadian accounts.

Give one of these a try and see if it doesn't lessen the drudgery.

 

[06_CY]

I use a spreadsheet and it works really well; I would feel lost without it. I created the original format but have tweaked it a bit over the past couple years. Really pleased with how it works for me.

 

[Trice]

While I would agree that you can do what you want with a spreadsheet I think there are real advantages to using an app. There are really 3 out there that standout. Quicken, Mint and Personal Finance. They will all import from all of your accounts -- bank accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, credit cards, etc. This saves you the time to enter all your transactions. They will guess at what category the transactions should be charged to and most of the time the guess will be correct. Sometimes the guess will be off and once you correct one transaction it will remember the correct category for the future.

I use Personal Capital. It has the Instream Monte Carlo built in. This may not mean much to most. It's a very powerful retirement planner that is used by many of the top financial planning firms.

All of these will let you quickly see your asset allocation and provide a personal balance sheet along with details of your spending. All of the transactions can be exported to a csv file. I do this annually to help prepare some reports for my wife to review.

We live in Canada for 4+ months annually. Here I used Mint as it allows import of my Canadian accounts.

Give one of these a try and see if it doesn't lessen the drudgery.

I'm not against using other tools, particularly for investments and retirement, but I have a hard time imagining that I will ever give up using my own spreadsheets. I just like the hands-on nature of being able to play with the numbers and adjust things myself.

There is some drudgery to be sure, especially at year-end when preparing a new spreadsheet for the next year. I'm trying to improve my Excel skills and find ways to mitigate that though. But for the most part I kind of geek out on it so it doesn't bother me.

 

[Tailg8er]

My high school, even back in 2006, required every senior to take an econ class prior to graduation. While we learned the basics of economics for several weeks, most of the class was personal finance. What and how do IRAs, Mortgages, Credit, Insurance, etc. work. High schools should be very capable of doing it. Having said that, like all education, parents need to be the drivers to ensure their children are applying what they are learning. Parents are ultimately responsible for their child, everyone else is just part of the team.

Similar thoughts here - graduated from a 4A Iowa high school in 2005 and there was a 'senior survival' course that you had to take. I'll admit it was very basic on all levels, but it at least introduced you to concepts. And I'd be surprised if it hasn't evolved at all. I think the idea of 'basic finance should be taught in high school' is misled, because I think it is more than people realize. Beyond that, it's definitely our own responsibility at the end of the day. ESPECIALLY for those of us in a personal finance thread on CF.. do you really think a high school class is going to teach our kids that you can ONLY buy a car with cash??

 

[ClonesFTW]

Similar thoughts here - graduated from a 4A Iowa high school in 2005 and there was a 'senior survival' course that you had to take. I'll admit it was very basic on all levels, but it at least introduced you to concepts. And I'd be surprised if it hasn't evolved at all. I think the idea of 'basic finance should be taught in high school' is misled, because I think it is more than people realize. Beyond that, it's definitely our own responsibility at the end of the day. ESPECIALLY for those of us in a personal finance thread on CF.. do you really think a high school class is going to teach our kids that you can ONLY buy a car with cash??

Had the same class; you from Council Bluffs by chance?

 

[Tailg8er]

Had the same class; you from Council Bluffs by chance?

Yep, Abraham Lincoln grad.

 

[randomfan44]

I could, but it would take a lot of work to anonymize it. Plus I'm working on improving its usability for less manual data entry.

But I can tell you what's in it. I have separate tabs for:

• Credit cards - I pay as much as possible on credit cards for rewards. I post/track transactions here
  
• Checking - just like a checkbook registry but it also includes all future activity for the year (linked from my budget tab)
• Money market - same as my checking tab
• Money market subaccounts - I split my money market account into subaccounts where I save for irregular items like vacations or the annual insurance bill. I track those here
• Pay - paycheck tracking
• Budget - current and forecasted future budgets
• Tracking - my budget for each month vs. expenses for each month, and the variance
• Net worth - tracked every 6 months
• Home loan/auto loan amortization schedules
• Auto mileage tracking and maintenance log
• Flex spending account tracking
• Utility tracking
• Taxes: withholding calculator and rough calculations of my taxes for the year
  
• Notes - change log of past changes I've made to the spreadsheet, notes to myself about future changes to make, or everything I need to do to get next year's spreadsheet ready, etc.
• I'm looking at adding a dashboard type of tab to better compare certain metrics from year to year, as well as a tab listing all of our accounts

I have separate workbooks for 1) all different types of insurance, and 2) savings goals including college and retirement.

Good lord, I already have a complicated job that makes my head spin. The last thing I want to do when I get home is be an accountant. With the hours you're likely spending on that level of management, my guess is your making only a few bucks an hour for the work.

Hide your money from yourself by moving it immediately into all your retirement/savings accounts, invest in some real estate that will pay for itself, pay a financial advisor and a tax professional and spend as much time as possible with your family is my advice.