One Method to Track Your Bills
The first financial spreadsheet I created was to track my bill payments. Years ago, my bills came in the mail, and I would just write a check when they showed up, and I recorded the amount paid in my checkbook ledger. I installed Quicken on my computer to record each transaction, and each year it would give me a summary of the types of transactions and their totals. Quicken was primarily used to balance my checkbook. But it was quite tedious to enter every check in my checkbook ledger, repeat the process in Quicken, and then try to balance my checkbook with Quicken every month. So I stopped using Quicken about 7-8 years ago, and I also stopped balancing my checkbook.
In the last couple of years, I started paying everything online and stopped receiving paper bills in the mail, instead opting for electronic bills and electronic payment. I might pay one or two bills by check and the rest are done electronically. Most companies send an email reminder when a bill is due. However, sometimes I would overlook a bill in my email or the reminder might not even show up. So I created a spreadsheet to track my monthly, quarterly, and yearly bills. This works well because I record the date I last paid a particular bill and a quick scan will show me which ones are likely to be due soon.
A beneficial side effect of my spreadsheet is that I could determine my yearly spend, at least for my bills. I added some additional rows for common expenses like groceries, gasoline, and things like that. With that detail, I could get a rough estimate of how much money I am spending each year.
I also stopped paying for most items in cash. I use my debit card for transactions where I handle the card myself, like paying for gas at the gasoline pump. I use credit cards for everything else, especially if someone takes your card and charges it out of your sight, such as at a restaurant. I do have rewards and cash back credit cards with which I pay off the balance every month.
Bill Tracking Spreadsheet
Here are some details of my tracking spreadsheet. I broke down the categories into daily/occasional, monthly, quarterly, and yearly expenses. My example is below is for 2018.
The spreadsheet above is something I fill out manually, usually once a week, when I pay my bills. It is a bill paying spreadsheet and it does not break down the expense types in the credit card payments, so it cannot be used to separate out discretionary spending from required spending. It does help me to know when I last paid a particular bill since I record the date of the last payment. For credit cards, the amount is the sum of what I paid for the month.
Download the Spreadsheet
You can access a template of the spreadsheet from this link.
The spreadsheet above will give you a close idea of what you are spending if you don’t use cash very often. However, it does not record all the items charged on my debit card, and it does not break down the items on my credit card into categories. You really want your debit and credit card spend categorized, so that later you can look at required spend vs discretionary spend.
Bank and Credit Card Transactions
You can get all of your transaction details from your banks or credit card companies by downloading the transactions. The format is usually Comma Separated Value (CSV) file format. I wrote a Ruby program that takes each transaction from the CSV files and maps them into categories. This breaks down the expenses into more detailed categories, and then I can separate them into discretionary and required totals. When you start analyzing your spend in planning for retirement, it is important to know what expenses can be cut or reduced.
I will talk about categorization of spend in a future blog.
