Spreadsheet budgeting

Financial Chat
21

Far too kind :joy::joy:

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22

Edward from Tiller here. Thanks @anon69248772 for mentioning our templates. Itā€™s great to read what people like (and donā€™t like) about spreadsheets for managing money. I love seeing the custom spreadsheets people have built to serve their specific financial goals and situation. I recently wrote a mega post about the unique benefits of using spreadsheets to manage money here. Iā€™m not currently a Monzo customer, but I follow the platform closely and am interested in trying it in the future.

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23

Thank you for the reply Edward

Why have you not taken the plunge?

Being able to see all your transaction live means you can keep your spreadsheet as up to date as possible

I wondered if you ever conisdered working with Monzo to auto fill a spreadsheet?

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24

Our spreadsheet is relatively straight forward.

A list of our bills (basically all our Direct Debits) and their payment dates, then a list of everything non-bill related, like Groceries, Petrol, Days Out etc.

Iā€™ve set up a really basic calculation to add all the expenses together, and then subtract from our incoming funds.

Itā€™s not perfect, but it does a good job of focussing us on what necessary spends we have coming up. I get paid weekly, so we update it weekly, which means weā€™re always pretty on top of it.

Ideally, when Monzo releases itā€™s Weekly summary option, we can look to transition over to that.

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25

Hey @EShepard, welcome to the forum! Tiller looks cool, I guess itā€™s only in the states though at the moment right, any plans to come to the UK?

26

Tiller currently only directly supports US-based institutions, but we do have many UK-based customers. Weā€™re working on expanding UK support in the year ahead. I donā€™t currently use Monzo as Iā€™m based in US but it really looks fantastic.

27

Well best of luck in the US and when you do move to the UK hopefully you will team up with Monzo

28

Oooh, mine hasnā€™t been used since August because Monzo covers so many basics now, but this is the latest version I used for over 2 years. I think this was version 3 or 4 though :thinking:

Split into Car / Set DDs / variable DDs / non essential DDs / saving / credit card payments

10

59

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29

For me itā€™s fairly simple using the 50/30/20 rule
50% is for essentials
30% is for spending
20% is savings

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30

Reminds me of what me da said to me many yeas ago, 1/3 to your ma for looking after you, 1/3 to you for spending, and 1/3 to savings so when you leave home youā€™ll have something.

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31

Hi! Great thread!
Iā€™m importing my monzo transactions to a google sheet with IFTTT. Does anyone who uses it know a more automatic way to calculate the daily spending?
Is there is a way to readjust the future daily allowance based on how much budget is left thatā€™d be great! At the moment Iā€™m doing all this manually:

  • I set up monthly budget for monzo

  • Set myself a daily allowance (X for each weekday and Y for each weekend days).

  • If I exceed my daily allowance then I recalculate and adjust (I do this weekly)

I would love to learn how to set up an excel file so it re-calculates and adjusts this for me!
Thanks :slight_smile:

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32

Interesting idea @anon14802692. Here are some thoughts on how to build such a spreadsheet in Excel.

  1. You will need a series of 12 cells that hold the count of weekdays and the count of weekend days for each month.

  2. You need to decide if your daily unspent budget goes to the other weekdays if itā€™s left over from a weekday spend or weekend balance if its from an unspent weekend spend. Or, do you see it being spread over the rest of the days of the week? Seems counterintuitive but you need to know this to build the s/sheet properly.

  3. What would you want to happen to budget overspend and any budget left over at the end of a month?

Iā€™m sure more will come to mind with a Hob Knob and a cuppa.

R-

33

OK, let me see

  1. Hmmā€¦ I was thinking that any overspend or unspent budget automatically readjusts the days ahead - that way if I go over the budget one day it has a small impact on the overall month, rather that just allowing me to keep on spending as planned (eg. if my weekday budget is Ā£10/weekday and Ā£20sat/sunday so if on Tuesday I spend Ā£30 I will be left with Ā£7.14/day and Ā£14.28sat/sunday for the remainder of the week).

  2. So far Iā€™m just considering this on an isolated month. Itā€™d be nice to see how much I went over or how much I saved but thatā€™s just against the overall budget so itā€™s fine.

Hope it makes sense! Thanks @RogerB

34

It will be some s/sheet thatā€™s for sure. I did have another thought over tea.

Do you see public holidays (Friday/Monday) and your personal holidays (perhaps 7 straight days) having a different budget than their normal allocation?

R-

35

I do apologise if this seems brutal, and please prove me wrong, but is all this really worth the effort? If this spreadsheet is something you need to look at every day, isnā€™t it easier to just look at your daily spending in app and see how youā€™re doing? How is knowing that you have, say, an adjusted Ā£7.14/day left for the following 3 weekdays going to be helpful in a practical way? When you go so granular, youā€™re bound to have to adjust budgets all the time, effectively defeating the point of having a budget in the first place ā€“ Maybe itā€™s just that daily budgets never made sense to me, but it sounds like an overly complicated approach?

36

The way I use it is to estimate my incomings and outgoings over a year.
So somethings are fixed like salary and rent and most bills.
So I have been doing it for a few years so I have a rough estimate for my spends on things.

So then I take that yearly budget and use it to estimate what I should be spending on things like food or meals out or drinks. The stuff that is easier to change if it looks like I might lose money over the year

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37

I use Google sheets through iftt to put all of my transactions onto a spreadsheet but I also created the below spreadsheet where I detail all of my Billā€™s / savings pots in and monitor what I have to spend at the end of the month

Feel free to use my template if you would like to

Finances Template

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39

Iā€™m happy to help you making something.

Are you a Plustomer? (or happy to copy and paste dump it whenever you want to update it) Are your savings in a pot?

One thing I track is the amount in my account, the day before I get paid. Then I can see that my overall ā€˜wealthā€™ is (hopefully) increasing no matter which pot itā€™s in.

I also copied one of these from the chart guru @Lewis_P

chart1

This might cover the disposable vs savings part?

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41

Once youā€™ve got the format sorted so it all lines up in whatever ways you can export it then itā€™s easy enough.

For projections then Lewis is definitely the man you need!

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42

Ok, I think I can pull something together for you pretty easily if youā€™re just looking to manually update a few figures every month and see what impact certain changes would make long term.

Just so Iā€™ve got a sense of exactly what info you want to be manually inputting every month, would the following be enough;

  • income
  • expenses
  • amount put towards savings

With these three values each month (plus a starting value), it would be pretty straight forward to forecast what the savings value would look like in the future. And to see what impact increasing or deceasing income/expenses/savings would have long term.

Iā€™ll have a quick play around now and get something to you shortly.

Oh also, I suggest using google sheets rather than excel. That way it wonā€™t go missing if your computer dies.

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