How I manage money?…..

Hi Readers...

This is not about making money. This blog is about how i manage money. It is pretty simple.
I started this from my high shcool days ,when we need to share apartment and share the expenses among our friends. We take turns in spending (buying the household items and running the house) and we write down in a small note book with all the receipts and end of month we calculate and split.

This became regular and I continue even i stay & work alone ( no need to share with anyone).
But i found this helped me in knowing my financial status upto date.
Now, i use spreadsheet, and thanks to the excel application, now I can see where I spend more and cash flow in details. And I can compare monthly and early pattern of my earnings and spending with my previous months or year.

Importance in money management is to know where your money goes into. You never know, if you don't have proper recordings of this.

I have a simple excel workbook, I have each month a new work sheet and I have work sheet for summary, car credit chart (other credit status), forecast.

On the monthly worksheet I have columns like, date, description, in , out, balance ( I have 2 in and out columns since I have two currency to handle). “In” represents the incoming money and “Out” represents the expenses. The First row will have the “Beginning balance from the previous month” (IN column for the two currencies will be filled from the BAL column)

Use simple, sum formula to add up your “In” and “Out” and the Balance is “In” minus “Out”.
Of course, looks simple hah….but not really, you tend to ignore and forget. Then you are back to square one.

Please be sincere in inputting the data and you won’t believe results. Once you have the result and you will automatically will know how to control it.

Finally , I will take the Sum of “In” and “Out” and “Balance” and I fill it in the summary work sheet (you can reference the cells if you are familiar with excel sheet).
I have a small graph to show the in, expenses, balance trend.

I have goal for savings and budget for travel orbudget for any new items for every year. This goes into my “Forecast” work sheet, so i can catch up with the goal.

That’s all. All the best.

Thank you , Readers.
JS