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I don't use money

Always try to live under your means

http://www.reddit.com/r/frugal

I am excellent at managing my money, mostly because I remember almost all of my purchases and have rarely had a steady cash flow so I usually just saved my money.

Creating a budget in Excel is a great way to track your finances, but let's keep it honest. It's going to take a lot of will power on your own to track all of your expenses on Excel. Saving receipts and constantly updating your spreadsheet will take commitment, and it's not the most glamorous thing to do either.

However, if you do stick with it (first 2 weeks of creating a new habit is always the hardest), and make the appropriate columns for your types of expenditures (housing, food, gas, utilities, entertainment, savings, etc), it will reveal a lot of information that you probably have not thought about until now. It will tell you where the bulk of your money is being spent, and in what areas you are overspending in.

Some tips I can offer to budget money

Do you frequently eat out for lunch or for dinner? Or grab a Starbuks every morning? It's crazy how much money is spent on eating out. I would recommend packing your lunch for work and cut back on dinning out if that's you're thing. Not only will you be saving money, you will probably be eating healthier, two benefits in one.

Do you often go to the bars and drink or go clubbing? A big part of your money can do there if you frequently go to those places. Do you gamble? Are you a compulsive shopper and end of buying stuff you don't need or use?

Adam said:

Always try to live under your means

http://www.reddit.com/r/frugal

i subscribe too

i do online banking so i use that to track my shit. i tried the excel thing but i didn't have the willpower to keep up. 99% of my purchases are either debit or credit so i can easily see what and when. plus i rarely buy things i don't need so most of my spending is for need based goods like gas, utilities etc.

but yeah. online banking ftw. i can export all my transactions and view them on excel.

Reducing your debt, especially on credit cards is very important as well.

TheMightyPeon said:

i do online banking so i use that to track my shit. i tried the excel thing but i didn't have the willpower to keep up. 99% of my purchases are either debit or credit so i can easily see what and when. plus i rarely buy things i don't need so most of my spending is for need based goods like gas, utilities etc.

but yeah. online banking ftw. i can export all my transactions and view them on excel.

This shit.  Chase has a pretty good online banking system, works for me anyways.

I seem to have no hobbies that require money, so I save more than I spend.

Being forever alone is my financial advice.

www.mint.com

I totally agree with the online banking.

I hardly ever carry cash cause when I do it disappears quickly. I have bank of america so withdrawing cash isn't ever a challenge (their atms are everywhere).

Their website has every transaction I make, and I can check it any time I have internet, so I can watch every penny that vanishes. It makes me never want to spend money.

Should probably stop buying so many drugs.

Blaze said:

Should probably stop buying so many drugs.

Don't listen to him.

I do not buy drugs anymore, except alcohol... have not bought any pot in about 2 months.  I also don't have any credit card debt anymore (thankfully).

My day job just started paying me via check (was all cash previously- they moved me from working in the shop to working in the office).  These checks go straight to Bank of America and get deposited.  I try to not use my debit card for anything, unless I have to.

My other job pays me cash and is off the books.  Is it an issue to deposit several hundred dollars worth of cash per week without accounting for it?  I feel like it's insignificant enough that it won't raise any red flags but the last thing I want is to run into trouble with taxes.  What I usually do with this job is take out most of my pay and put it into my lock box, and keep the remainder for the following day (ex: make $62, put away $50 and keep $12).

For now, I want to keep my cash as cash because I am saving up to buy a car and there is no reason to put the money into the bank and then take it out again next month.  Not sure what I will do after that.

I have some ideas for how to cut out unnecessary spending... not eating out is a solid one; I am not used to being up early for my day job so I am usually rushing out the door to get there on time.  I can cut back on spending AND stress by preparing the night before (laying out clothes, preparing & packing lunch, making sure my car has gas, etc).  I feel like if I am working between 10 and 15 hours in a day, it is not unreasonable to spend $10 or so on some type of "unneeded" purchase, but I think that I am not being strategic about it and spending more than that.

I think food and gas station purchases (energy drinks, Gatorade, cigarettes, gum, etc) are more of an issue for me than shopping or gambling or clubbing.  I am locked in an ongoing battle to quit smoking which I will eventually win, but I'm not sure when.  This will be a huge cut in daily spending.

Gatorade is the great budget breaker.

Powerades have been sucking me in lately with their 2 for $3 tractor beam.

My first job was at a pizza place next to a gas station and I spent 10 dollars a day on snacks and drinks. When I worked in the mall at a coffee shop, I spent so much money on food court food. But I worked so many hours a week that I did virtually nothing else, so I was still building up my savings. When I worked at a pharmacy I would buy an energy drink and then eat lunch at a fast food place.

When I think back, if I had never wasted money on fast food and gas station purchases and had just made my lunch at home, I could probably afford a BMW.

cigarettes and train tickets and drinking and food, I can cut out two of them and reduce my monthly expenditure by about a half.

Probably the best thing you do if you go to either college or work is just buy a bunch of microwavable noodles and a bunch of sodas(go to BJs, buy them in bulk for cheap). Bring a soda and a noodle packet to work/college and just have that for the day.

Jaku the hustla

what's a 3 card monti scam

I read the wikipedia entry, I understand how the game works but not the scam part.

I use excel to track expenses.  Track your expenses in this way (standard database format) and read a how-to on PIVOT TABLES, they'll make tracking your expenses very easy.  Track expenses for 3-4 months before trying to make an official budget, IMO.

TheMightyPeon said:

i do online banking so i use that to track my shit. i tried the excel thing but i didn't have the willpower to keep up. 99% of my purchases are either debit or credit so i can easily see what and when. plus i rarely buy things i don't need so most of my spending is for need based goods like gas, utilities etc.

but yeah. online banking ftw. i can export all my transactions and view them on excel.

I haven't found any online banking software that allows me to extrapolate and project like I want to...then again I'm a financial analyst so i get off on projections and the rest of the forum probably doesn't care that much about them

This is how I have it right now to keep track of the 3 "accounts".  Bank of America has Keep The Change enabled so all debit card purchases will be rounded up to the dollar and I will just be pleasantly surprised by un-tracked savings account growth.

Bank / Wallet / Lockbox columns get either positive numbers, which are colored green, or negative numbers, which are red.  They're auto formatted to currency and the totals on the right-hand side get updated.

I think that I will color-coordinate either the Location column or Description / Notes column to designate "importance".  Something like Blue = Credit / Increase, and for expenses: Green = Necessity (gas, etc), Yellow = Marginal (could be reduced or eliminated), Red = Unneeded.

Have not spent any money yet this year.

Is the purpose of your spreadsheet to simply track your net capital or to track and limit expenses?

If it's for the latter, I'd have 1 tab per "account" (bank, wallet, box) and track debits and credits on each. And one tab that's a summary of all. When I get home, I'll show you the last one I did.

Also, you track your wallet? That's gotta be hard.

Yeah, the way you have it laid out is wrong, you're doing way too much work on your own and not making excel do any of it for you.

Lockbox will be seeing mainly credits as most of the money that goes in does not come out.  It is meant to be a stockpile of cash to use for large cash purchases (ex: saving for a car).  It is the "savings account" for my cash job.

Bank account will see weekly deposits from my day job paychecks, and predictable debits for bills / expenses / etc totaling maybe 5 or 6 transactions per month.  It is a checking account but I only buy things with the card if I do not have cash for whatever reason.

Wallet is basically like my checking account for the cash job and this is what will be seeing the most activity.  I get paid every day so money that is not necessary for daily activities will be rolled into the lockbox, or deposited to cover any necessary expenses that the day job's paychecks do not cover.

I don't think that there is enough activity to justify a separate tab for each "account" but who knows.  This set up will require a new spreadsheet or tab every month.  Maybe at the end of January I will evaluate how functional it is and adjust it if necessary. 

TMP - I would like to see how you do it, just remember that I probably have far fewer transactions than you do and that ~70% of my income is cash.

I have huge respect for people who can use excel to a high level.

Would like to see Creed and TMP's spreadsheets please.

Also Jaku's story is cool.

fusi0n said:

Lockbox will be seeing mainly credits as most of the money that goes in does not come out.  It is meant to be a stockpile of cash to use for large cash purchases (ex: saving for a car).  It is the "savings account" for my cash job.

Bank account will see weekly deposits from my day job paychecks, and predictable debits for bills / expenses / etc totaling maybe 5 or 6 transactions per month.  It is a checking account but I only buy things with the card if I do not have cash for whatever reason.

Wallet is basically like my checking account for the cash job and this is what will be seeing the most activity.  I get paid every day so money that is not necessary for daily activities will be rolled into the lockbox, or deposited to cover any necessary expenses that the day job's paychecks do not cover.

I don't think that there is enough activity to justify a separate tab for each "account" but who knows.  This set up will require a new spreadsheet or tab every month.  Maybe at the end of January I will evaluate how functional it is and adjust it if necessary. 

TMP - I would like to see how you do it, just remember that I probably have far fewer transactions than you do and that ~70% of my income is cash.

You should only enter data into one tab, ever.

Knowing how to use Excel is probably one of the most important skills ever.  I took Management Information Systems and Accounting Information Systems in school, and even though I almost died from the course load, I learned the most from them compared to my other classes.

i looked for my last "budget" file i did. i only found one from may last year lol:



in the above, i have two tabs. one for each account. i get the data straight from my bank's website and format it to give me the month, week etc. then i make the pivot to show me my monthly net gain or losses (which is what i care about). i can easily drop in week numbers etc. if needed to see more detail. for me, the monthly values are what i care about.



my visa transaction snap shot. columns A to D are raw data straight from the export off internet banking site. the rest are formatted for my own purposes. i can easily sort for my most commonly used items (petrocan for gas) to look those up too if i want.

at my stage in life, my income and expenses are very steady. i haven't done this budget yet because i'm at a point where i have highly monthly expenses due to my eye surgery. once i'm done the payments in may i'll be deeper in the green.

EDIT: the main thing this exercise helped me with was to show me exactly how i was doing month to month. just looking at my balance online and eyeballing my transactions doesn't tell me the full story.

creed said:

You should only enter data into one tab, ever.

When you say tab, do you mean sheets? And if so, what's the reasoning?

I need to (v)look up pivot tables. Got asked in an interview if I knew how to use them, politely and honestly told them no I didn't.

Cazb0t said:

what's a 3 card monti scam

Basically you place three cards on a table as a deal, you show them one card, mix them up(some magicians do nothing to the cards) and the player bets an amount of where the card they were shown. Most(if not all) three card monti games are scams however using a few magicians tricks to perform. Sometimes there are more than three cards hiding under the cards and they throw new cards when they reveal. Sometimes the cards are marked in some way for the dealer to know the position. There are A LOT of ways to scam it though beyond those basic ones.

hfswjyr said:

creed said:

You should only enter data into one tab, ever.

When you say tab, do you mean sheets? And if so, what's the reasoning?

I need to (v)look up pivot tables. Got asked in an interview if I knew how to use them, politely and honestly told them no I didn't.

for future reference; if anyone ever asks you if you have a skill like excel, power point, CAD, say "No but i have used a similar software (or in your case "i use excel quite a bit") and i am fast learner. i feel confident i can quickly pickup on <skill> if i'm provided some training".

i'm not sure what Creed means. i'm going to guess "don't put the same data on two different sheets". i have many files with several tabs of different data. i then have one working sheet/tab where i consolidate the data in whatever format i need.

for example: sheet 1 for summary, sheet 2 for item information (SKU, cost, dimensions, weight), sheet 2 for vendor data (address, vendor number, contacts) etc. etc.

but i'd never have 2 sheets for my bank transaction data i used in my example. if i have more than 1 million lines of data for any sheet, then it's time i used access or SQL thingy.

Yea, should have done that in the interview. (Didn't get the job).

IIRC they asked how're your excel skills (said good), then they asked vlookup? (yes), pivot table? (no...), macros? (no...)

But like I said, I really respect pro excel users. One guy at my previous place of work had spreadsheets that acted more like flash websites. Asked to learn from him, but never got the time to. He did call me grasshopper.

I can do Excel macros because Visual Basic is my bitch.

One data-sheet just makes things easier, you're only ever referencing one data-file, the same data-file, so inconsistencies across your outputs is going to be tough.  In the example where you have a VISA account and an AMEX account, instead of having separate data-files I would just add a column to the data-files that differentiates between VISA and AMEX 

hfswjyr said:

Yea, should have done that in the interview. (Didn't get the job).

IIRC they asked how're your excel skills (said good), then they asked vlookup? (yes), pivot table? (no...), macros? (no...)

But like I said, I really respect pro excel users. One guy at my previous place of work had spreadsheets that acted more like flash websites. Asked to learn from him, but never got the time to. He did call me grasshopper.

excel is not hard to learn. excel and access (or SQL) will help you tons as an engineer. i learned them all on my own. i once new vba but now i don't.

also, when in doubt, google it. i google shit like "how do i remove multiple blanks in excel?" and i always get an answer.

EDIT: "knew"

omfg yeah, i google a lot of generic things (i remember that specific google search, myself, actually)

I don't need google. I'm just going to ask you guys.

My methods for recording incoming / outgoing money seems to be working despite being unorthodox. 

o dear lord this exploded into some serious shit that ill have to read at some point but damn i hate accounting.

Almost 1 week of successfully tracking my money now.  I can see the flaws in my system.  I will be developing a better spreadsheet soon.  I implemented a few more columns: Category (Gas, Food, Bill, etc) and Rating (1 = wasteful, 4 = legitimate / 5 = credit).  It is too haphazard, though, since I am adding information on the fly.  I definitely see that I need to categorize spending in order to see what I am buying (ex: what % of my spending goes to gas, etc).  And the rating / importance is important too, because I want to know how much of my spending is going to each category of transaction. 

I will continue to record data in my current spreadsheet, since I am not going to create a new one right this second and I don't want to lose track of anything.  However I will be making the new one ASAP.  I will probably need some help with formulas that I am not as familiar with so hopefully someone can provide some insight (Creed / TMP). 

The good thing is that, after 6 days of doing this, my spreadsheet matches my bank account, lockbox savings & wallet.

I also might be buying a car on Monday!  If anything this will probably make me even more money-conscious since I will be very nearly broke.

I think that on my new spreadsheet there will be one tab per account & a summary tab with graphs, charts & overall data / totals.

As long as you enter data into only one location I can make your dreams come true.  This is my god damned job, sorry for being a dick but read my posts and try to design your spreadsheet around how I recommend, if you need any help get at me (sprin104@umn.edu) and I'd be happy to assist.