The Lemon Fool

It's probably my incompetence (or lack of patience perhaps!) with searching on the LemonFool but I cannot find:

- a spreadsheet template for expenditure
- that I can use to enter and track expenditure over a few years
- to establish a baseline for expenditure in retirement.

Anyone know of one - before I go an create my own which will no doubt be inferior and incomplete!

Thanks in advance!

B

Bhoddhisatva wrote:
It's probably my incompetence (or lack of patience perhaps!) with searching on the LemonFool but I cannot find:

- a spreadsheet template for expenditure
- that I can use to enter and track expenditure over a few years
- to establish a baseline for expenditure in retirement.

Anyone know of one - before I go an create my own which will no doubt be inferior and incomplete!

Does it need to be a spreadsheet?

I only ask because Microsoft Money is still available to download, and I've been using it for years for exactly the purpose you're envisaging -

https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11163&p=131837#p131837

The above was posted in April, but I've just checked the links and they are still working fine.

You can export from Microsoft Money into a spreadsheet, by the way, if you're thinking of a specific scenario where you may need to do that.

Money is good in that you can set up your own granular categories, so you can be as high-level or low-level as you like - it's entirely up to you, but for the task you're looking to do, I'd say that it's probably ideal and certainly worth a play with to check and see if it's suitable.

This single piece of software absolutely transformed my money-management processes overnight - I highly recommend it.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

There's one at moneysavingexpert.com that might be of use
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/content/dam/mse/documents/guides/budget_planner.xls

I don't use it myself - basically I don't need it - but I downloaded a copy a while back just to see what it contained and it looked pretty decent.

cheers
Spiderbill

Itsallaguess wrote:Does it need to be a spreadsheet?

I only ask because Microsoft Money is still available to download, and I've been using it for years for exactly the purpose you're envisaging

I can also vouch for Microsoft Money - I've been using it for years to track spending by various categories. It's fascinating to see the trends over time (eg when my kids got to 17 and there is a spike in car insurance and petrol), and it gives a good basis for confident forecasting of future spending.

I download all the transactions from Money into excel on an annual basis, and use a pivot table to summarise spending by category in each year - double-clicking a total then shows every transaction that makes up the total.

Unlike Itsallaguess, I download all the transactions from my bank, so there is a difference in purpose there: I think Itsallaguess sees it as a way of verifying bank statements, whereas I see it just as a copy of the statements. Transactions are automatically assigned a category (if the payee has been used before) so it requires little effort to update.

I have an issue to solve though, which is that I've started using a credit card on holiday abroad (to avoid the 2% surcharge on my debit card), so the detail of those transactions is lost. All I see currently in Money is the total monthly payment made from the debit card categorised under, say, "Mallorca 2018".

MyNameIsUrl wrote:I have an issue to solve though, which is that I've started using a credit card on holiday abroad (to avoid the 2% surcharge on my debit card), so the detail of those transactions is lost.

I'd also vote for MSMoney. On this specific issue, you don't need to lose the granularity. I track CC spending in the same way as a debit card - when you set up a CC account ( or afterwards in "Change account settings" ) there is an option "Account Tracking", where you can opt to track individual charges. The CC account then allows you to follow your spend in the same detail as a debit card.