After a certain point, granularity gets in the way for me. I find that keeping it more simple, broad-strokes seems to work well for us. Income is gross, and in the tax category I break out what goes to FICA, not just income tax. Harry- Wage, Business, Business Cap Gains
On each page, there is a column for monthly, quarterly, and annual expense amounts, and a column for an annual "actual".ġ. Investments and net worth are not covered in this sheet at all, but there is a space where I put the current and previous years' savings and debt as a trend. Income and cash savings is also totaled on the home page. It has 8 pages of categories that get totaled on a home page. I modeled it after the AICP bid form that is used in commercial film production because it's relatively simple and easily expandable. I use a custom Excel spreadsheet as well. It is actually quite astounding to me that people use products like Mint. If Target, OPM, and banks can be hacked, so can some website that automatically categorizes every banking transaction I make. We download transactions, copy and paste them into the sheet for that account, assign each transaction a category, and that amount is totaled on a summary sheet that shows each category and how much we spent in it that month.Ībove all else, I am VERY uncomfortable with giving a third party all of my banking information. She created the Excel spreadsheet and it absolutely does everything we need it to. My wife is an engineer and much better at math than me. I manage all our finances from investments to taxable income to budget and more on excel sheets. Excel is capable of so many things it is truly amazing. Any canned software is going to force you to conform to it and not the other way around.Īdd me in on this.
Works exactly the way I want and should I desire another cut of the data, I just build that in. +3 - I have my built my own as well (multi-tabbed in excel). I collect expense data in Quicken and summarize these in the overall spreadsheet, especially annualized expenditures. I've been rolling my own spreadsheet for several years now and include retirement simulations, overall analysis of funds and distribution, and can create "what if" scenarios as needed. The only way you can get your own unique analysis and outlook is to do it yourself in Excel. Do it monthly if you need more of a reminder. We take one day every quarter or so and download all transactions and plug them into our expenses categories to see how we did. Plenty of people here will tell you to use Mint or other similar programs/sites, but I am just not in favor of giving a third party all of my banking information. It would take time, but building a spreadsheet would be the best.