Key Post A spreadsheet that might help work out your finances

j26

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I've been using a variation of the spreadsheet below for a number of years now to help me plan my finances and test certain scenarios (e.g. what will happen when the children are born etc)

The basic idea is that you put in all your income and expenses, and the frequency of the expense (Weekly, Fortnightly, Monthly, Bi-Monthly, Annually). There are then columns which convert that expense to what it would be Weekly, Monthly etc. This is useful because if you are paid weekly, for example, but your mortgage is monthly, you know how much out of each paycheque you need to keep for the mortgage. Similarly, it is useful to know how much of each paycheque is alocated to the annual payments such as insurance so you can plan for them. I've filled out some samples to give you the idea. A few tips are available on the screen to help.

Over to the right is a summary screen that will tell you the overall position and whether there is any residue - i.e. are you earning more than your outgoings, or vice versa. Red is a bad sign - you are living beyond your means and need to cut back somewhere.

Beneath this there is a chart summarising the position in percentage terms. Note that it doesn't give meaningful results if you are in the red.



People who are posting in the Money Makeover section might find it useful to test their own finances before posting.



New Link (If there's any problems let me know.


It's an Excel file, but also works in Openoffice.

Important Note: I created this spreadsheet years ago, and have tested it with AVG anti-virus. However, I would strongly recommend that you subject it to whatever anti-virus/anti-spyware software that you feel appropriate, as I will not be held responsible for anything malicious that may be found in it. You are downloading at your own risk.

Enjoy :p
 
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I think I did download this spreadsheet a few months ago. If no-one else comes along with it before the weekend, I can see if I managed to save it onto a USB stick (laptop died a few months ago and I didn't manage to recover everything) and try and post it somewhere. From the sound of the OP, there wouldn't be any copyright issues with that but please let me know if there are.

The spreadhsheet linked to in this blog post from marriedwithluggage is pretty good, too, if you want to start straightaway with something. Just needs small changes like euro instead of dollar signs and changing of categories if they don't suit (I don't pay anyone alimony, for example so didn't need that bit - in fact I just changed the entire legal section to debt, which is something I definitely could make use of).
 
Hi,

In the last couple of days I've received a load of requests to share the spreadsheet, so it appears there is some problem with people accessing it.

I've put it up on dropbox, so hopefully it'll work for downloads now

[broken link removed]

Edit: I don't appear to be able to modify the OP, so one of the mods may oblige.
 
Hi J

I have deleted around 20 posts thanking you for the excellent spreadsheet so that people don't have to read them all to get to your second post.

Brendan
 
Sounds great, but the original post was 2010! So not working. Is this post alive somewhere else?

Thanks
 
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