I update my personal finance spreadsheet almost monthly. I was sharing about it on Twitter recently when some users asked for a copy. So here is my personal finance spreadsheet. It’s just a template and can be customised to suite your needs.
Download my personal finance spreadsheet
The spreadsheet is free (as in you can download it for $0). But, a donation would be appreciated.
How to use my personal finance spreadsheet
Firstly, please note that this is just the spreadsheet that I use. It’s by no means the “be all and end all” of personal finance spreadsheets, and it’s certainly won’t work for everyone. What I’d suggest is that you update it thoroughly with your own figures and then tweak it to make it your own.
In my actual spreadsheet I also split out my personal items from assets and expenses that go through a family trust. If you want to know more about that you can start with this one on what is a trust. I also have some items specifically marked as my spouses as it makes sense in the context. So feel free to edit this to work for your circumstances. However, no need to over-complicate things.
Just two other points:
- we actually track our overall finances together in one spreadsheet; so you can do that if it makes sense,
- and I have some off-shore investments in USD. I have a column for USD amounts and a cell where I update the exchange rate. I removed these for this template and made it all a single currency. Just saying.
The Summary Sheet
When you open my personal finance spreadsheet, the first sheet you’ll see is the Summary.
This shows ones Net Worth, FIRE percentage and other interesting percentages. To find out more about the “Rule of 25” you can read my post on how much do you need to retire. This is not an exact science, and it also changes as your circumstances change. But, I like to have an annual goal regarding my Net Worth growth as well as my FIRE percentage.
Note that for the FIRE calculations I use the “Expenses in FIRE” column on the Expenses tab and look at monthly recurring income, but excluding my salary.
You’ll see little Orange notes all over the place. These give explanations of what something is for and once you’re comfortable using the spreadsheet you can simply delete these.
I have left everything “unlocked” and you can edit to your hearts content. If you mess anything up you can just download a new one and try again.
For those who are interested, you could predict your FIRE percentage for say 24 months from now. Use the Future Value formula to take your current FIRE value, an assumed growth (eg 5%) and a monthly investment as per your Investing Sheet. See what you get.
Assets & Liabilities
These two sheets are quite self-explanatory. Under Assets you just list all Assets. These include:
- Investments
- Bank Accounts
- Cash on hand
- Antiques
- Items of value in your home (that you can resell should you need the money)
- Precious metals
- Your home
- Your car(s)
- Crypto currencies (have you tried out the Luno app yet?)
- etc
You will notice the two columns called “Include in Assets” and “Include in FIRE”. You may have valuable assets which don’t actually form part of your personal assets. ie Family heirlooms or in my case I have some money invested which I have earmarked for my parents. I list it as an asset but I don’t include it in the calculations. As for the “Include in FIRE”, some assets won’t help you cover expenses once retired. Eg your house and car.
Then, as far as the Liabilities sheet goes, these are all your debts.
- Home loan
- Vehicle Finances
- Store cards
- Credit cards
- Personal Loans
- Pay Day Loans
- Etc
It’s useful to have a good overview of this. For the FIRE calculations it is assumed that all your debt is paid off. That makes sense to me.
As far as my credit card spending goes, I pay it off each month in full so I don’t actually list it as a debt. You can decide what works best for you.
Income & Expenses
The Income and Expenses sheets are simply to list all your steady income, along with your monthly expenses. There is room for you to tweak this a little if it doesn’t fully make sense to you.
The first area that may seem confusing is that I list my Net Salary (that is paid in to my bank account) and then “add back” the deductions to show my full after-tax salary. The deductions are then shown in the Expenses sheet and the provident fund investment is shown in the Investment sheet.
Then, in my own budget I set aside monthly amounts for things that are not necessarily monthly expenses. Things such as home maintenance, car maintenance, pet-related expenses, etc. Again, you should do what makes sense to you and your budget.
Note that the column for “Expense in FIRE” is to indicate what the expense would be if you actually retired. You would possibly rethink some priorities and spending and probably need to lower your expenses.
Investing & Dividends
I like to automate things so the Investing sheet shows all set recurring monthly investments. You may not have set amounts each month and that’s okay, especially if you plan to update this monthly. Just fill it in as best you can right now.
The Dividends sheet is a manual process whereby I capture the dividend income per investment, each month. I then use the last 12 months to get an average dividend income. These figures are not used in any calculations and are for an optional view on your investments.
I like to use this figure though to see that my annual dividend income is in fact growing.
Diversification
Much like the Dividends Sheet, the Diversification Sheet is purely optional. It is a little tedious setting up as it requires you to look at the Fact Sheets of all your investments and work out the percentages in various asset classes. I use the blue “Overall Summary” to help me with my investment strategy as I can see overall where my money is.
I have also linked the investment values to my Assets Sheet so that they are always updated but it is a bit of a manual process in the beginning.
Luckily though, ones investments don’t change all that much each month so it’s pretty much a once-off time investment.
This is shouting out to be customised to suite your needs!
Potential Savings
This final sheet is simply the money left over from your whole income (including the additional sources of income), after expenses, debt payments and investing. It’s called “potential savings” as you may be able to save it, but maybe not. It pulls through to the Summary Sheet as the Savings Rate.
Hope you enjoy using this personal finance spreadsheet
As mentioned at the start, this is a copy of my own personal finance spreadsheet. I update mine each month and use it to assist with goal setting and to understand where my money is.
I have also split it between my personal finances and a family trust. You could for example add sheets for a business that you have, or for your partner.
There are no pretty graphs or pie charts and no predictions. LOL. But, feel free to add them.
Do you like spreadsheets? Here is another…
Please feel free to ask questions in the comments, or share suggestions. Of course you can catch me on social media too. Let’s chat about ho wyou manage your personal finances.