Personal Finance Tracker for Beginners (template included)!

Key Takeaways

back when i was in college and playing the lead role in a live-action remake of dragon ball z i used this app called mint to track my spending my expenses and my income it was automated it had nice graphs it did its job but what ended up happening was that i would log on once in a while look at my monthly expenses tell myself i would spend less on useless gadgets and immediately forget about that promise the very next day so for the past year i've used a more manual method to track my spending and investments and as a result i'm now a lot more mindful of my personal finances in this video i'm going to go over this extremely simple personal finance tracker i built on google sheets and show you how by just spending 10 minutes a month you can be more intentional about your spending habits let's get started hi friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is jeff and quick disclaimer up front i'm not an expert on personal finance or investing i'm just a control freak so trust me only for my tips on organization first off i needed this template to do three things number one give me a rough idea of my monthly spending to show me any trends in my spending habits number two show me my net worth based on my expenses and investments to make sure it's going up and number three it had to be something i would spend 10 minutes a month on max or i knew i wasn't gonna do it diving right into the tracker the first tab here is an empty template you can start using immediately i've actually linked this down in the description below so you can make a copy and follow along if you'd like from a template logic standpoint you want to update one row once a month on the first of every month but the data you input should be for the previous month since those numbers will be finalized for example if today is september 1st then i'll be updating the row for august from a structural standpoint and i'm going to jump over to a fictional example here the objective of the table on the left-hand side is to show me at a glance my total monthly spend column d sums up my overall three expense buckets and takes out what i call reimbursables i'll explain what all of this means in a little bit moving over to the right hand side here this table shows me my net worth which is basically adding together all my assets like my savings and my stocks minus all my liability like what i owe on my credit card now that you have the general gist let's break down what each one of these columns mean starting again from the left first thing you want to do on the first every month is to create a new row on mac is command option plus on windows i think it's ctrl shift plus year and month are self-explanatory obviously and for rent let's say it says constant ten thousand uh all this is an rmb by the way not us dollars because i currently reside in china and because i reside in china we have something called alipay and wechat the two largest payment platforms here and i would spend most of my money through these two apps this template works no matter where you live don't worry keep watching so what does spend minus split bill mean well to give a very simple example let's say you and your three friends go out to eat the total comes out to be 100 and you pay with your card but your friends all pay you back 25 each to split the bill technically you paid out 100 but you only spent 25. so if that's all you spent all month what you would input is equal 100 minus 75 split bill the money you got back and the 25 here reflects your actual expense now what's cool for both the alipay and wechat apps is that they expected this to happen so for every month i'll literally open up the transactional page on either one of these apps and it shows me on the same page what i paid out and what i received back very user friendly so what i would literally do is for the alipay column deduct the split bill income which is zero for this particular example from the actual spend here on the left and this gives me the final spend now i'm assuming most of you watching this video do not use alipay or wechat but the logic is the same if you have a credit card or checking account look at your monthly expense statement and deduct what your friends then mode you and that's what you actually spent now moving over to the wechat column how is it possible for there to be a negative amount here well i might have paid through alipay but my friends sent me back money on wechat since that's a social app here and since i spent xero on wechat but i received back 537 dollars 0 minus 537 is negative 537 and this negative amount offsets the positive spend from the alipay part so my formula here that adds these three columns together still makes sense moving over to the column i deduct specifically the reimbursable column as some of you might have already guessed this is money you get reimbursed for so you didn't really spend this money for example in june let's say i booked a hotel for my dad and i got to deposit back after my dad checked in or in may i paid for a doctor's appointment but i got reimbursed by the health insurance company a few days later so why did i bother with this well no matter what app you use wechat alipay or your bank's mobile app there's probably a way to sort your top spending items in descending order but the app itself is not smart enough to recognize the reimbursable ones so i manually take them out in my total spend formula for the yellow comments column this is where i take a deep breath and face the cold hard reality that i sometimes spend money on very useless things you don't see it here it's fictional but i do from that descending expense chart i talked about just now i'll literally just list out the top five most expensive items i spent money on that month and this really gives me an opportunity to reflect on whether those items apart from food and transportation were smart purchase decisions or not and if i regret buying something typing it out having it in front of me has really helped me become more mindful about my spending habits and since starting this exercise a year ago i've definitely spent way less on electronics which is something i used to buy a lot more of let me know if that's you as well now i just want to re-emphasize this total spend tracking system isn't perfect but compared to budgeting apps like mint you're not giving up any of your data if you're security conscious and you can use this in any country around the world i'd love for you to let me know down in the comments if this is something you're already doing or perhaps you're following along this template right now moving over to the network side of things you might first notice i own a few different currencies r b hkd and usd and obviously i need to convert them all into a single currency to figure out how much i'm worth financially because in the eyes of my parents i'm priceless so all i need to do here is to fill out the dark gray columns for my bank columns one two three and four i would deduct what i owe on the credit card from the amount i see on my bank statement very simple you just need to log in to your app or account to see those numbers for my two brokerage accounts weibull and interactive brokers i will just log in and write down how much my stocks are worth on that particular day since it obviously fluctuates but again this just lets me see at a glance how my portfolio is doing over time quick note here back in the states i mainly use robinhood but as you can see i recently made the switch over to weibull to be very honest i think the user interface on robinhood is a lot simpler but weibull provides me with a lot more data and analysis to work with i do have an affiliate link with weeble so i'll link that down below if you sign up using that link you get two free stocks or something if you're new to investing and you would like to get started i highly recommend you check out andrejik's channel he's entertaining he's good looking and i think he tries his best to be as objective as possible so he basically shares all three traits with me all right back to net worth column t if you work at a company where you receive stocks as a form of compensation i recommend you include the vested portion as part of your net worth because that's a part you can sell immediately and convert to cash now that's all done i need to convert all this back into rmb so using column n here hong kong dollars to r b as an example i have a formula where i sum up the three hong kong dollar columns and multiply that with the google finance currency converter formula from hong kong dollars to chinese yuen and this gives me the total r b amount uh this updates in real time but as well by the way i repeat the process for us dollars and i simply sum these four r and b columns up to figure out my net worth if you don't need to convert currencies the logic still holds true and also some of you might have already noticed i don't track my sources of income in the spreadsheet so if that's something you'd like to learn more about let me know down in the comments to wrap things up download this template schedule in a 15 minute monthly recurring event on calendar and commit to filling this out for at least three months yes it's a bit more manual not 100 accurate but i found that going through this once a month has really helped me become more aware of my spending habits and i usually go into the next month with a bit more intention see you on the next video and in the meantime have a great one