As a follow-up to “Use a spreadsheet to keep a monthly budgget“, here we’ll detail how you can easily track your income and savings with a spreadsheet. First, here’s the link:
Click here to download a sample Income and Savings spreadsheet.This spreadsheet layout makes it dead simple to keep an inventory of all your paychecks and chart how much you save. Some may call this overkill, but after the spreadsheet is set up it requires just 30 seconds each time you input another paycheck or deposit. Those few seconds are well worth the comfort we get from a detailed view of all our income and savings over time.
The spreadsheet is composed of five sheets:
- Pay Checks: A chronological list of all paychecks received.
- Savings: A chronological list of deposits and withdrawls to and from all forms of savings accounts.
- Interest: A list of interest earned on all savings accounts.
- Percentages: A set of formulas that provide an overview of how much you’re earning and saving.
- Totals: A set of formulas that provide an overview of your total income and savings.
We could list interest in the “pay checks” sheet as just another form of income, but we like seeing a separate view of interest earned, all by itself.
Caution! We do not advise inputting specific personal information such as social security and account numbers into this spreadsheet. You’ll notice that we do not even display names of financial institutions. If someone were to gain unauthorized access to your computer, this spreadsheet would be a home run for anyone looking to commit identity theft (were it to contain personally identifying information).
