There are tons of articles available on the Do’s and Dont’s of better money management, personal finance and making money in the stock markets.
We all have our own ambitions and goals when it comes to making our money work for us based on risk appetite, budgets and various other factors. However, there is one very basic aspect which we tend to overlook.
Effectively Managing Our Finances
As they say, you can never enough money to invest until you actually know how much you really have.In other words, we tend to overlook and budget our expenditures and fall short of keeping a track of the income.
A very simple and routine task is to maintain a simple log of all our income and the expenditures that we make. This helps in understanding the true situation of the spare money in hand to keep aside for investment.
Spreadsheets are one of the best ways to budget finances and its rather easy to do so. However, creating a spreadsheet to properly include all items and then use formulae to calculate the total income and expenses can be a tedious task for a few.
I sat together to put together a very basic yet handy spreadsheet template which automates the whole process. All you need to do is download the spreadsheet and enter the amounts against the various columns provided.
I have also included two columns. One allows you to enter you Projected Income/Expenses and the other is for Actual Income/Expenses. This is very helpful in keeping a track of your financial goals and find out if you are sticking to your budget.
The sheet is comprehensive and encompasses almost all expenses under the sun including Housing, Transportation, Insurance, Children, Entertainment, Loans, Personal Care etc. The sub-totals and totals are calculated automatically so you don’t have to bother about those.
Download the spreadsheet from Scribd here or alternatively i have also uploaded it at Google Docs here
Hope you find it useful and do share freely with others. Also, please feel free to comment if there are any issues with the spreadsheet