ERE Spreadsheet Templates

[OneStep]

I recommend DIY, too. It's the only way I began to understand the formulas from the ERE book.

Excel now has a feature called "Money in Excel" that allows you to connect to your accounts and pull transactions in. It also comes with some charts, but I mostly scrapped all those and created my own from scratch. You can also use Power Query to combine tables and make a more elaborate data model -- so you can combine the auto-imported transactions with transactions you record manually.

Excel will cost $$$, but if you already have it, it's a good option.

[C40]

** I also recommend that you build your own. **

But.. I have just made a template for my girlfriend, so I'll share it here as an example. This template is for someone just starting out, mainly focused on tracking spending and starting to save. There isn't tracking of things like investment income. This is not fully generic, as all the categories are set up for her, and the chart scales are high because she uses Vietnamese Dong.

The first sheet is for data entry, then there are 5 or so charts (which are not visible when viewing in Google drive. They'll only show up once you download the file and open in Excel.

Go these links and download the excel files. The way that the file and calculations work should be pretty obvious once you have some personal finance understanding. Don't ask me for help. If you find errors, feel free to let me know:

Blank template: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T716m8 ... sp=sharing
File with example numbers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1otfcQr ... sp=sharing


And now that I've uploaded those for sharing, I see a template that I shared back in 2014. This may have more capability and more charts
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1i8uT ... sp=sharing

[Scott 2]

Now that I am looking more closely at withdrawal strategies, I have to admit - personal capital falls woefully short there.

I've had to roll my own and am iterating. Carefully understanding the tax implications of my various income streams has been the core problem - managing asset allocations and locations. I've had to match incomes from:

Roth Conversion
Non-Qualified Dividends
Interest
Salary
Short term capital gains
Qualified Dividends
Long term capital gains
Social Security

With tax brackets of:

Federal
State
Medicare
Social Security
ACA Subsidies
ACA Cost Sharing

It's a pain in the ass and situation specific. I haven't come across a good tool that will do the work for me.

[2Birds1Stone]

It's a pain in the ass and situation specific. I haven't come across a good tool that will do the work for me.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1klX_6n ... p=drivesdk

[Scott 2]

That's a great picture of the complexity I've run into. I'll look into using it. Thanks.

[Daniel1979]

I'm using two spreadsheets that I update on the beginning of the month:

One for monthly family budgets, so we know how much money goes off our accounts and how much cash to withdraw, and most importantly, how much will be saved.

And one for our net worth (assets vs. liabilities): The values of stock investments and accounts I put in by hand, values of retirement accounts and real estate are calculated based on formulas. It also includes some visualizations such as treemaps (to see how our assets are distributed over different classes), and waterfall charts (to visualize assets vs. debt), and a line chart to visualize progress over time (actual net worth vs. planned milestones).

I really like playing with excel, and I think I might build something more complex. But then, I'm not sure that would be useful, as updating everything takes me only 15min once a month.