My Money Management Spreadsheet

My Excel based debt tracking, bill tracking,  and investment tracking system has been under development for about 5 years – well before my To Do list manager.

It started out as a way of tracking all of my monthly bills. I get paid twice monthly – on the 16 & 31. My bills are due throughout the month. I wanted to be able to track all of my bills so that I wouldn’t forget any bills thus avoiding late fees and penalties. I also wanted to be able to automatically know where I’d get the most bang for my buck on paying off a debt with any windfall. Handling these tow tasks was relatively easy and have since added investment tracking, asset tracking and a net worth calculator which is updated daily.

Currently I’m working on a checkbook register. This is mainly to track spending (all this to tell me I need to cut back on Starbucks ) but also to use to replace my paper checkbook register. I plan to use a “Pocket Mod” template to carry a copy of my checkbook register with me with space for a few extra entries.

Of course I could do all this with Quicken easily – I even own Quicken 2005 but I get a lot of satisfaction from using a tool which I developed myself (see my My Productivity System post here).

I recently googled excel money management systems and found It’s Your Money which has a bunch of moiney management spreadsheet. They have a whole section with various financial Excel spreadsheets here. I have downloaded some of the free ones. I already have most of the functionality included in my spreadsheets but I am revamping some of the look and feel of my spreadsheets based on what I’ve seen on It’s Your Money.

My Productivity System Decision

So I’ve officially dumped all of the various productivity systems, to do list managers, etc out there and will be sticking with my own home grown, Excel base to do system. I tried out many diferent systems and several were very useful systems. All other systems started at a disadvantage though – they were built by someone else. I can take pride in my self-built system and can also constantly be tweaking the system which I enjoy. If my system doesn’t do something right, freezes up, or any other fun computer stuff, I have nobody to blame for myself (well, I may cuss Bill Gates on the occasional Excel/Windows problem ).

My investigation into the various tools has led to some improvements to my to do list manager (ToDo). I had been developing my ToDo for several years and it worked well for what it was. During my research I read a lot about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) time management system. I have incorporated some GTD principles into ToDo and also into my daily work and task management.