This is going to be the foundation of your Conscious Spending Plan. I’m going to help you redirect it to the places you choose, like investing, saving, and even spending more on the things you love (but less on the things you don’t). Instead, we’re going to create a new, simple way of spending. Who wants to track their spending? The few people who actually try it find that their budgets completely fail after two days because tracking every penny is overwhelming. The main issue with it is simple: Human willpower. This is unconscious spending (aka spreadsheet budgeting). How often do you feel guilty about buying something but do it anyway? How many times have you opened your bills, winced, then shrugged and said, I guess I spent that much? That might have worked for them, but it doesn’t work now. What about you? Do you use spreadsheets to track and manage your finances? Please share your thoughts and examples in the comments section.When people think budgeting, images of their parents studiously going over receipts, writing down expenses in a notebook, and screaming, “WHY DID WE SPEND SO MUCH ON GAS LAST WEEK?” come to mind. From time to time I have shared those techniques here on too. I have built several workbooks to track budgets, vacation plans, retirement scenarios, self-employment cash flows and house purchases. I have used spreadsheets to track money soon after I started my first job 15 years ago. Read more about Excel treemaps and sunburst charts | Another example of treemap – customer service dashboard Do you use Excel to track and manage money? In fact, I have created another version of the spreadsheet with column charts so that you can use it in earlier versions of Excel. But if you want, you can use column / bar / donut / pie charts too. I have used Treemaps because they work well with data like this. In the settings page, we can harvest all category level spending in one column and then feed that to any chart in Excel. Spending by category graph – Treemap (Excel 2016) Use CTRL+Click to multi-select the cells.ģ. We just set up databar on all cells in one go (so Excel can relatively size them based on values). The databar cells have a reference to totals calculated in cells above. This data bar is made with Conditional Formatting. Quick visualization of category level spendingĪs you enter values, you can see a quick total (arrived thru the formulas explained above) and a data bar. Read up more about SUMIFS and SUMPRODUCT formulas.Ģ. If there is an error (typos / no data etc.) we show 0. We then multiply that with amounts in G7:G26 thru SUMPRODUCT and finally divide this with 12 to get monthly value. We are fetching an array of multiplication factors from freqs table (shown aside) using SUMIFS. Say you have amounts in G7:G26 and frequencies in H7:H26. Using SUMPRODUCT and SUMIFS, we can calculate total amount per category by month, like below.There is a frequency mapping table in the “Settings” tab to help calculate monthly totals from various amounts at different frequencies.Calculation of monthly totals by category: There are three components in the budget spreadsheet:ġ. The graph on left helps you see the big picture and optimize your spending / savings.The BALANCE row on the left turns RED if you spend more than you make.As you type data, category level summaries are shown on top along with a data bar to show relative expenditure of each category.You can select various frequencies (for example public transport – $16 per week, dining out $70 per month etc.) Start by entering your income and itemized spending. Click here to download free budget template. So in the spirit of making you awesome in life, not just Excel, let me share a simple but elegant household budget spreadsheet. Once you can track (or estimate) how much you are spending, it is easy to see how much you are paying your future self and what wiggle room you have. One of the simple ways to achieve this is by using a budget. I believe in frugal living and paying yourself first.
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