There are hundreds of templates online about personal finance, but for some reason I didn’t like any of them, so I created my own and figured I’m going to share it and maybe with your help I will improve it. There are also tons of apps out there, but none of them were for me. I guess I’m picky.
Obviously I’m not going to share my income nor my expenses, all the numbers that are in the example are made up/fake.
Get the template from Google Drive
Why do you need a personal finance spreadsheet?
We all want to know where we spend our money, how much we make and how much we invest. The older you get the more you realize how important this stuff is and will be. You need to know your own numbers in order to change them.
This is what I pay attention to:
- Income after tax from my 9 to 5 job and all my side hustles.
- Work expenses such as – domain, hosting, occasional ad spending, etc.
- Technology – laptop, tablet, phone, LTE services, etc.
- Apartment – rent & utilities.
- Entertainment – Netflix, PlayStation, etc.
- Food – how much I spend on groceries and how much I spend in restaurants.
- Occasional expenses – Clothing, gas, travel, medicine, haircut, etc.
- Investments – where I invest my savings
When I have gathered all of this information which takes me around 40-60minutes each month I can make a summary of all my expenses and create an estimated budget in case I have some financial goals in mind.
Summary:
- Income
- Budget
- Left to spend
- Invested
- Investment ratio
- Saving
Also if you are using my template you will be able to see all of these categories summary by months and also by quarters – Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. It helps you to see the trend if you managed to cut your expenses or not. Did you manage to increase your income or not, etc. Keeps you on track.
How much should you invest?
I’ve to state that I’m not a financial advisor – I do not provide personal investment advice and I am not a qualified licensed investment advisor. I am an amateur investor.
Otherwise I can get sued. A beautiful world we live in.
But in whole honesty if you ask me how much should you invest I would say – everything. Everything you can afford. If you are not saving up for a big purchase like real estate or car, business, and you have saved up 3 months salary in your bank account and you’re left off with $1 000, yes you should invest it.
I’m personally currently in the market for real estate so I try to keep the investment ratio around 10%. I don’t want to let it go lower or higher than that currently.
I guess the general rule of thumb is 10% of your income, as soon as you receive your salary you pay yourself first, don’t wait till the end of the month, and invest what’s left off, otherwise, you will fail, speaking from personal experience. There is no right or wrong answer, it just depends on your financial goals.
This is something I learned from a book – Rich dad poor dad.
Where do I invest my money?
Right now, I’m going slow on the investments, since I’m in the market for a new apartment, but I try to invest in cryptocurrency. Yeah, yeah I know I’m going to get some comments from some smug as*holes that that’s not an investment – I don’t care, write that crap in your own blogs.
- I’ve invested in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Basic Attention Token.
Basic Attention Token which is backed by Brave Browser is one of the rare crypto projects that actually have a working product and a lot of users that love their stuff and I use their product myself and it made sense for me to invest in it. I think it’s innovative and it will improve the advertising industry. I’m willing to take that bet.
- I’m also currently investing in my personal blogs.
- And in near future I plan to invest small percentage also in P2P platforms – Mintos, VIAINVEST. Diversification.
- Stocks.
- Spare change.
I love the feature that the banks and non-bank cards such as Revolut offer – spare your change. I save around $100 each month by doing this. Save enough and turn it into stock or crypto or whatever.
Investment calculator
You need to create your financial goal, otherwise, what’s the point? Save up until you die?
There is a great tool online – Investment calculator
You can add your initial investment amount e.g. $5 000 add monthly/weekly contribution e.g $500 and your expected rate of return e.g 12% and how long you’re going to stick to this plan e.g 25-years and it will show up how much you will save up.
You can do also do this stuff in your spreadsheet, of course, but this tool makes it easier. This of course is just an example, it’s difficult to keep 12% yearly rate of return, most likely it will never be constant.
Summary
Like I said before if you want to make your numbers dance or grow you have to know them first. It won’t take more than an hour every month to do this. How can you take care of other people’s money if you can’t even take care of your own money? How can you help a business grown if you don’t even know how to grow your own salary? Numbers are everything. It can either make or break your business. I don’t know maybe it’s just me. I work in marketing and I need to know as many numbers as possible, the key metrics, to be more specific and only when I know them I can improve the results. Otherwise you make a decision based on bad data. The data is important in business and data is important in your personal finance.
I hope this article and template was helpful. Leave me a comment below and let me know how you keep track of your personal finance and investments. Have a good one.
Here’s the spreadsheet template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ooVbW_YBU8rqj_zZgZ78fpPzafiP-advh5SQ8B_Wdbg/edit?usp=sharing
you should be able to access it but you won’t be able to edit it, you can copy/paste it in your own spreadsheet and edit it there.
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