Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Engineering/logical thought side of ERE, help out your local space-outs: would you be willing to share a doogle docs or similar link to a blank copy of the spreadsheet you use to calculate the various financial optimization metrics you happen to track such as TTM average spending, cost per calorie, etc. etc. Looking less for a precise type of spreadsheet and more for examples of what people are doing, in what level of detail, and what kinds of metrics they find to be meaningful to track, with a possible view of shamelessly stealing your spreadsheet construction work 1-2 months from now. While I do hope to benefit from other people's efforts, I'm sure this is likely to be useful to more than just me.

Many thanks!

When my now-wife and I first moved in together, I used to do double entry accounting for every single cent. At the time, I was the only one bringing in money. I felt it gave us a better overview in a tight situation.

I've long since scrapped most of that. Here is what I do now:
- For my wife, I manually produce a very short monthly cash based report: income; expenses; savings amount and rate; investments: hers, mine, common, total; debt.
- For myself, I maintain a spreadsheet:
- fairly ok snapshot of income, budget, debt, possessions, projected returns
- no historical values. I could save myself effort _and_ get a more accurate view by incorporating those. I hand collect them for the wife anyway.

This spreadsheet would need _a lot_ of work to become usable or even inspirational for anyone else I'm afraid. I'll try to have a go at that in June.

No spreadsheet anymore, but I like to show the alternative. Since beginning of the year I am self-hosting actualbudget on my Pi. https://actualbudget.org/

All transactions are automatically categorised into broad groups for simplicity. I use a dashboard to track averages, which I’ve come to value more over the years, so I focus on those. (If anyone is using actualbudget I could share you my dashboard JSON)



edit: I prefer using averages because they give a clearer picture of my real spending habits. It helps me set better budgets and notice small changes over time. I’d recommend only tracking data you actually plan to make decisions on. It reminds me of a colleague who bought a smartwatch to track his health without making a change to his lifestyle.

@ertyu:

I think this is a bit of a tough ask, because moving from 4->6 spreadsheets or similar are bound to become more idiosyncratic. For better or worse, even a spreadsheet can be inclusive of the entirety of AQAL objective/interobjective/intersubjective/subjective quadrants or perspectives. However, that said, I think simple monthly tracking (as opposed to budgeting) of personal expenditures within self-defined categories would be most consistent core spreadsheet. Generally, I keep my tracking separate from my goal setting, except to the extent that it becomes helpful to alter categories towards generating information. For example, if I am attempting to lose weight, I may break Treats out as its own category from Groceries. I also recently re-inserted the YMOYL values clarification column (Yes/No "Was this line item worth the cost?") in my tracking sheet, but as much for the purpose of possibly increasing some of my expenditures as reducing others; more towards mindfully tweaking my spending "menu" than "reducing calories" or maybe akin to "ethical slut pleasure-maxing" rather than "chastity pin polishing challenge." For example, Car Insurance| Blah, Musical Theater Tickets | Yes!

Since I see myself as a self-employed generalist, I tend towards spinning out a separate sheet for anything vaguely resembling either a project/venture or an income source. For example, Permaculture Project 3, Crypto, Private Math Tutoring, Flea Market Book Stall, would each own a sheet (or more) until/unless archived. So, for me, if I were to apply the 4% rule, it would only be relevant to my Stock Investment sheet, but not my Stock Trading sheet. Since W2 employment is just one (or more ) of my varying income sources, I tend to also treat it as a business endeavor in terms of spread-sheeting, and this is helpful in terms of calculating/comparing Real Wage and Resource Usage and also for tax purposes. Overall, I would probably win the forum prize for most spread-sheet income tracking complexity per actual dollar earned However, this practice is towards what keeps me feeling free and self-authoring. I also sometimes amuse myself by breaking out sheets for more primitive economic activities such as Foraging or Dating.

Finally, I have a consolidating sheet or set of sheets. I switch these up fairly often. My core current consolidating sheet has the categories Day, Flow, Run, River, Roll, Ride, Retire, and Ratio. I created it towards making sure my daily spending level was once more in alignment with Eco-Sustainable PPP ($33/day) and Early Withdrawal Social Security ($25/day.) My spending had temporarily exceeded this level due to living by myself in my own apartment and owning a car while recovering from Crohn's Disease. Now that I've gone back to Communal Living and Car-Free, my Daily Spending is way below $25, and I still have more than 600 days to go until even early withdrawal social security, so I added the Ratio column in order to theoretically motivate me towards increasing Rolling Daily Earn/Rolling Daily Spend towards fattening up Total Roll towards Project/Venture Optionality. The reason I calculate both earning and spending on a daily basis is that my methods of earning are very flexible and I want to keep them that way. Also, it amuses me more to imagine myself as a free-wheeling hustler with a roll of cash in my pocket and a new game to play than as a stodgy investor building a bank of bricks fortress. YMMV significantly

I track the following (with varying levels of diligence and monthly updates):

Heat (Cost + therms)
Electric (Cost + kwh)
Miles Driven
Cell Data Usage (gb/digital minimalism proxy)
Annualized Carbon Footprint (based on a simplified formula using Heat/Electric/Miles Driven)
Body Weight
Steps (pedometer-based)
Meditation (minutes)
Books Read
Monthly Total Spending
Monthly SWR (Annualized)
Twelve Month Trailing (TTM)
Savings Rate
Net Worth

I also also do manual calorie/nutrient/cost per calorie tracking/price comparison for food purchases, but that's more for snapshot analysis. My spreadsheet is quite idiosyncratic at this point. Lots of sheets that spin off for different activities that I may or may not return to.

The only spreadsheets I still maintain are essentially a "balance sheet" that updates my NW in real time and an "income statement" that updates my capital income from various sources (mostly dividends), also in real time. The balance sheet contains no history but does make projections of future NW, expenses, income going month-by-month for the upfront few years ... and then later year by year up to/beyond my time of death. Projections have been both useful and surprisingly accurate. I made one for DW too which hooks into mine and we both update them on a monthly basis.

In terms of ERE, that's all I over used [spreadsheet optimization] for. I did not spend a lot of time at WL4-5 as far as personal finance is concerned.

However, it IS a powerful method insofar you keep it up. I've used spreadsheets to entirely up my game. I've basically had three "ideas" that I added on and each time it resulted in a significant shift in the rate at which I was moving towards my goals(*). It changed the way I was playing for the better. Specifically, for "optimization" it gives you a goal as well as feedback on how effectively you're approaching the goal. This is something WL1-4 lacks and therefore they tend not make as much progress.

(*) The first was calculating the profit for each production line so as to always be prioritizing the most profitable one. The second was to design my bases and maximize the area according to which plants are the more profitable. The third was to organize my supplies based on what was needed rather than just what I was momentarily running short on.

FWIW, I'm a big believer in "rolling you own" rather than borrowing someone else's or outsourcing the thinking to an app or tool. I am not sure if I can generalize this to saying that DIY is always better. However, if other people's tools have failed to inspire, try making your own. A pencil and graph paper may be all that's needed. You can then post it on the fridge, YMOYL-style.

The ability to reliably generate graphs is augmented by treating the spreadsheet more as a proper database. My financial tracking spreadsheet uses a worksheet as a "ledger" input database (date, account, entry type e.g. contribution income withdrawal expenditure, value) from which "queries" are generated in subsequent worksheets for balance sheet, cash flow, income, graphs, etc. This is basically the same way that most accounting software works as well.

A lot of more sophisticated optimizations that you can do in a spreadsheet program start relying more on LP solvers and the like, e.g. trying to meet nutritional targets for minimal cost from some staple ingredients. These spreadsheets are often just a handful of functions thrown into the solver's maw.

I've found that some serious optimizations start running into feedback loops, logical branches, graphical representations and dataset sizes that spreadsheet programs are not great at handling. It's become more efficient to directly program (example) whatever I'm looking to optimize.

basuragomi wrote: ↑

Thu May 15, 2025 10:10 am

The ability to reliably generate graphs is augmented by treating the spreadsheet more as a proper database. My financial tracking spreadsheet uses a worksheet as a "ledger" input database (date, account, entry type e.g. contribution income withdrawal expenditure, value) from which "queries" are generated in subsequent worksheets for balance sheet, cash flow, income,

This was the turning point in my tracking as well. I add a category and sub-category to each transaction.

My annual budget sheet pulls from the ledger. At the sub-category level, the columns are:

Last Month's Spend
Year to Date Spend
High Budget
Low Budget
Forecast Annual Spend

The categories are used to group and total, building to my grand total. Forecasts more than 20% over/under budget are highlighted for review.