Keeping track

trance

I've never been good at maximising my savings, leaving them to languish in low interest/no interest accounts, up until now,  but I am determined to be more money savvy starting from this year!

I've got a basic spreadsheet, which lists bank current accounts, building society savings account, I've even opened an ISA account and a regular savers account - all with different banks.
I also have a Freetrade account, a Wise account, a Chase savings account. And a small amount of shares.

I wanted to track how much money I have in them, interest rates, if there are limits on higher interest rates (for example, the regular saver is for 1 year at a decent rate).

I'd also like to track subscriptions, insurance etc.

Do you have a spreadsheet that you use, and would be willing to share, or is there a website or app where I could keep track of exactly where my money is and what it's doing?

Archerychick

Personally I use money software, but I also love an excel spreadsheet which is great for financial planning. It sounds like you know exactly what you want to see so could you build that out in excel?

trance

Archerychick said:

Personally I use money software, but I also love an excel spreadsheet which is great for financial planning. It sounds like you know exactly what you want to see so could you build that out in excel?

I'm not that good on excel - I have columns for where the money is, another column noting interest rates, but not much else.   I'd like one that could calculate how much interest I should be getting etc.
I've looked on Etsy, because they have loads of predesigned spreadsheets, but they're mainly aimed at saving for something - wedding, holiday, etc, for people putting regular money aside, so it's not really what I want.

What money software do you have, is it Microsoft Money?

refluxer

trance said:

I'm not that good on excel - I have columns for where the money is, another column noting interest rates, but not much else.   I'd like one that could calculate how much interest I should be getting etc.

That's actually an easy one - if you've got a column populated with AER data and a column populated with your account balances then all you have to do is create a new column for 'Expected interest PA' and multiply those two columns together.

To do this - in the top results cell of your new column, type equals (=), click in the first cell in the AER column, then asterix (*) and click in the first cell in the balance column, then hit the Enter/Return key. If you do this for the top entry in your table, then you can select the cell, grab the + symbol in the bottom right-hand corner, drag that downwards and it should populate the values below with the correct formulae and data.

To avoid having to continually type % or £ (etc) and also to ensure that Excel treats the data correctly, then make sure you format the columns appropriately - just note that if you already have data entered, it may alter when you do this (particularly with percentages) so the best option is to create a copy of the column first and make changes to that, to avoid the risk of losing data you've already entered. If all goes well, you can simply delete the original column.

AER : right-click the column, go to Format Cells and select Percentage to 2 decimal places.

Balance and Expected interest PA : right-click the column, go to Format Cells and select Currency to 2 decimal places and a £ symbol.

Of course this only gives an approximate value for expected interest PA as it would require the whole balance to be present at the indicated rate for a whole year. This makes it ideal for fixed rate accounts (where interest rate and balances are fixed) but can still be useful as an indication of how much you could expect from your easy access or other accounts with variable interest rates, which may be helpful when keeping an eye on your PSA. For Regular Savers, I just over-type the cell formula with the amount of interest mentioned in the account Summary Box on the bank's website, as the actual amount received will be somewhere around that figure, but of course this will depend on how and when the account is funded. 

Note that AER presumes that any interest credited monthly isn't paid away to an external account so bare that in mind, plus for fixed rate accounts where interest is added to the account monthly, you either need to resist updating the balance monthly or if you do want to do that, then you're best creating a separate column for 'Initial deposit' and doing your interest calculation using that column and not the balance column.

My biggest bit of advice when starting out with learning Excel is to make copies of your spreadsheets at regular intervals. That way, if either you or your PC/laptop mess up (sheets can get corrupted, power-cuts, HDD failure etc), you minimise the amount of data that is lost and has to be re-entered. 

Archerychick

A nice set of instructions there! 

I use moneydance which isn’t anything special, and as far as I won’t forecast interest etc. I use this to see my current balances, and allow me to do some spending analysis. I don’t use it to budget or anything like that - I think there are better platforms for that.

For future values I use excel - which gives me a month on month build, based on the interest rate & actual amount I usually save per month. I think update this at the end of a month with actual so it then updates for the next month. The actual reason I sent this up was because I have money saved for the mortgage to pay that off at the end of my current deal, but I always wanted to start planning for retirement so wanted to model out  savings & investments outside the pension. I’ve also massively complicated things by having something like twenty accounts across different institutions 🫣

I’d suggest following the above instructions and see if that gives you what you need because it sounds like you don’t need something that’s massively complicated? Come back to this thread if there is something further we can try and help with  

VNX

I’m good with where all my money is and how much is in each account and the interest rates being earned but I don’t have a spreadsheet. 

I’ve got it all written down, my five ISAs, my four fixed bonds. Just the total balances of each account and each month I add any accrued interest, suits me.

cloud_dog

Still using MS Money. Could not function without it 😳

I think a few of the regulars here have moved across to AceMoney (I think) due to MS Money not being supported any longer (but apparently it is quite happy on W11).

There are all sorts of report, tracking, goal projections you can set up if you wish.  Have to be honest I don't tend to use those features much.  I use the reports and personalised reports.

If you wanted to try it I have a copy of the last UK version, or you could download the sunset version but that was primarily US focused.

I love Excel (have pretty much planned our retirement in Excel), but we can all make errors and with human nature as it is, we may not spot it, etc.

ShinyStarlight1

Is Apple’s Numbers app any good?

HSC_2

Another vote for MS Money (Sunset Edition) here.  Everything including my Premium Bonds and Pensions have their own account in there and I pay away bills (provisional sums to amend later where necessary) months ahead and all expected income, including interest, and it helps me track cashflow and see what's where, note account numbers and limits etc.  Categorising spending means you can run a report and see how much you've spent in certain budget areas.

gwt1965

ShinyStarlight1 said:

Is Apple’s Numbers app any good?

I’ve just transferred all my Excel retirement planning spreadsheets to Numbers. Does everything you need, though probably not as powerful as Excel and its table organisation method takes a bit of getting used to. If you’re on a Mac, have a look at Banktivity. I’ve been using this for a long time now. You can have all sorts of accounts, run reports, automatically import bank data and update investment values for stocks, funds, ETFs etc. Good support as well and regular updates. 

droopsnoot

I'm also using MS Money, currently the 2000 version but I did download the last UK version, just not got around to trying it yet. There was someone on here developing a similar thing but I've not had chance to try it out. There are things I don't like about MS Money, but not enough to try to get years of data across into something new, even though I think most of them have import routines. I've never had it set up to download anything from banks automatically, which I think is the thing that most people complain about having stopped working - I don't have enough transactions to make it too much of a problem to just type them in.