Tools & spreadsheets for managing money

wneil wrote: »

Simple Excel spreadsheet for income tax

That may be right for high earners, but for low earners, it misses out dividend allowance and dividends, savings income, Personal Savings Allowance, and Starting Rate Savings Allowance.

darkidoe wrote: »

Where do u learn all these excel tips and trick? I have difficulty just getting simple equations in, never mind naming cells.

When you use a tool all day, every day in your job you get pretty familiar with it. That said there's always more to learn with Excel.

I've been on a couple of courses in the past but most of what I know I've picked up from watching other people, seeing other spreadsheets or just playing around and googling to figure out how stuff works.

As this thread illustrates, there's always about 100 ways of achieving a particular outcome. Most of the time the method you choose doesn't really matter.

I basically have four main spreadsheets for different functions, and I am now retired, having drifted int retirement or semi retirement somewhere between the age of 45 and 50 depending on what you call retirement, work or semi retirement.

The first is a simple spreadsheet that contains the current value of all liquid assets including bank accounts, any investments etc. I then have a column for interest rates or growth and therefore a bottom line that gives me total assets and probable income at today.

I have a tax spreadsheet which is the basis of entering all the stuff needed for our tax returns.

I have a spreadsheet collection which records rough monthly outgoings which is for a couple of homes, cars, travel, and other necessities and indulgences. This shows what I could do if I needed to cut my spend for example by selling a house or a car and what it would save.

The most important one that I started when I left the corporation and started our own business is a sort of consolidation of "where we are today and what is the effect of the worst possible scenario". Basically I use this as a sinking fund projection and in very simple terms with columns for opening total value including a value of all current assets including properties but not things like cars, an annual presumed increase factor for fixed investments like our property, an annual current spend column a column for actual income, and a column which shows the closing value at the end of each year after assets have increased and been depleted by spend which becomes the opening balance for the following year.

The reason why the last spreadsheet has been so important in our lives was that it showed us early on when we had started our business where we were risk wise. So early on I could say to wifey " the very worst that will happen to us today if our business failed is that we could by a caravan and we would survive if ai found a job." Eventually I could say "We have made and saved enough to stop and as long as we aren't silly we have enough to live on for the rest of our lives reasonably comfortably and without too much of a risk". It helped make sense of our situation at any moment in fairly fraught and risky times much more tangibly.

But the path and points in between guided my view about business risk and what I was prepared to do or not do. I feel that such a sheet is useful for people other than self employed because it gives a really good snapshot of exactly where you are and what you need to do to get yourself int the situation you wish to be in. Put simply it tells me how old I would be when I run out of cash and assets.

Whenever our accountants saw this sheet they were stunned by it's usefulness and simplicity and recommended it to their other clients. It can have the effect of stopping people from worrying when they might actually have little to worry about, or provide the basis of a blueprint to show what needs to be done to secure yourself. For example, it told me that I didn't need to increase my wealth as a necessity so I could afford to take all our cash out of "investments" and put them into bank accounts, which as both of us are a "worrier" stopped us worrying about risk that wasn't required.

Anyway, not a reply on "how to" but my view of what I find useful to manage and make sense of our lives. Hope someone else finds it of interest.

Jeff


.