Try this spreadsheet today for your financial planning!

Google spreadsheet link
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mfi...dit?usp=sharing

Features
- Summary of your expenditure and savings per month, throughout the year.
- Net worth summary which plucks the numbers from your spreadsheet to help you track your investments allocation.
- Link your previous/next spreadsheet to bring forward the calculations across your spreadsheets.
- Upgrade your spreadsheet to the template's latest version to enjoy new features.

Sample summary:


What does it mean to have a good plan?
The sheet contains various conditional formatting to tell you whether there's something good/bad. In general, I use the traffic light colouring: red is bad, yellow is "almost there", green is good. Let's look at some of the details below.

Summary > ending balance
You may notice red/yellow indicators.
Red means you have not enough for the next month. The sheet tracks your budget monthly and that strictly means from first day to last day of the month, e.g. 1-29 February 2020, 1-30 June 2021 etc. Having that said, it does not have the level of detail to tell you how much you're spending by day; this sheet cannot tell you how much you will spend on 20 June, and how much you will have left by the end of that day. What this sheet does however, is that it assumes all your expenses are clocked in on day 1 of the month, and your salary comes in much later. This means, in order to have a healthy plan, you need to have enough ending balance on the month before, to cover for the next month, e.g.
Income = 10k
Jan ending balance = 2k
Feb expense = 5k
Result > Jan ending balance is shown as red, as it is NOT enough to cover for Feb expenses. It assumes that Feb's income will not come on time.
Note:
- investments are not calculated as part of the expenses. This sheet assumes that your investments will be done AFTER your pay day of the month, so that in case you have extra expenses, the first outflow you can cut is your investment, without affecting the your life comforts i.e. the essentials and nonessentials. This is to provide more flexibility for you to manage for when you get your huge bonus for the month, that you want to do the investment in the same month itself, without hurting your KPI directly (i.e. red ending balance indicators even though you know it's fine).

Yellow means you have too much idle cash; the current threshold/formula = your income * 2. This sheet intends to facilitate investments/savings. The ending balance is meant to kept at a healthy "just enough" level, while allowing you to slowly "plant your money tree" to save for the rainy days. As you start your journey in financial planning, investment will eventually come into the picture because money depreciates; you need to let the power of compounding help cushion the fall. Meaning, you need to let your money generate more money for you. But it does not have to be risky investments that do not fit your appetite; that is all up to you, and it is completely up to you to decide where you will keep your extra cash -- all you have to do is jot that down under Investment tab. I have yet to figure out a good way to visualise extraction your invested money to cover for sudden shortfalls.

Summary > buying power
This answers "how much can I splurge this year?" Notice the value never exceeds a certain point even though your ending balance is much higher -- this is because the amount you can splurge is not simply the ending balance, but it also takes account of:
- how much you're supposed to invest up to that month
- how much needed for subsequent month expenses
Note: having 3,000 buying power on March, but 2,000 on April, means that you're NOT supposed to YOLO spend all 3,000 on March itself. Because, in doing so, you will end up in 1,000 deficit once you enter April, as indicated by the red ending balance if you add a 3,000 expenditure.

Summary > Target savings
Dictated by your % target based on your income.
Green = target reached
Yellow = almost there
Red = far from target
This is completely up to you. You ought to balance this out with your expenses and buying power, so that you can have a comfortable life for yourself, while not forgetting to save. The sheet guides you by telling you result of your configurations and inputs, but ultimately, you're the one deciding how much you should save, or spend.

Summary > Debit/Credit weightage
Visualises your debit (money in) vs. credit (money out) to see distribution of your expenses throughout the year. Ending balance is counted towards credit weightage to balance DR/CR. When balance is negative, it is displayed as red to the left.

Developer's note
This is my little personal project to publish it for everyone to use, for free. Please feel free to PM me for any question/support regarding this spreadsheet, or financial planning in general, to manage your expenditures better. Note that I am not qualified and do not provide investment advice.

My motivation comes from wanting to improve my own sheet, since I'm the #1 user after all! However, I do want this to work for more people too, so I want to know what you think about my spreadsheet, and whether you would like to use it:
If "not yet", what's stopping you?
If "no", why not?

Eventually, if time+passion+effort allows, I hope to come up with more formal guidelines (like YouTube videos) and channels to support this project.


This post has been edited by Takudan: Jul 1 2023, 08:50 PM

Sheets
Updates are in blue.

Start - introduction
Setup - spreadsheet configurations
Changelog - list of version changes, mainly to help track your document version vs. template

Upgrade - configuration to upgrade your spreadsheet via macros. The script will copy template sheets, then match by sheets of the same name, to migrate pre-mapped values as configured in this sheet from your existing to the new sheets.

Input sheets (blue, by default): all your money inflow and outflow per month goes here. 4 sheets:
1. Essentials - necessary expenses
2. Non-essentials - expenses that can be cut down in times of need
3. Income - net income (amount that reaches you).
4. Investment - outflow that goes to savings/investments
- Values can be approximate to ease your tracking effort, and I recommend you to round up your values so you "overestimate" your spending. This gives you more spare cash when your spending is lower than planned.

EF - Emergency funds planning that supports any type of short term investments/savings. In each section, you need to specify:
- Previous balance - amount carried forward from previous year(s)
- Interest rate (% p.a.), compounding (or not) and frequency - the sheet automatically calculates your earned interest per month, taking account of whether it is a compounding back into principal, as well as its frequency.
Non-compounding interests are recorded back into Income sheet.
Placements and withdrawals are recorded back into Investment sheet.
Finally, you can track your emergency funds target and progress at the topmost rows. Configure your desired number of months to sustain, and give a custom multiplier to the minimum amount needed if you want a more comfortable unemployment/zero-income period.

Summary - here is where you plan your savings %. You can see how it reflects immediately onto your overall budget.
There are 2 main charts for overview:
- Summary chart: visualises income and expenses, each with two sub-categories.
- Cumulative summary: separated starting balance for clarity.

Net Worth Summary - track your money tree. There is limited calculations for now as it is new... idk how to calculate annualised returns and others yet...
I haven't figured out what if you extract your investments for usage...

Income Tax - Insurance - jot down your insurance premiums and their %, for tax relief calculation

Income Tax - Relief - works as a checksum for your tax relief. Also extracts some information directly from spreadsheet, e.g. PRS, insurance. Table follows year of assessment 2022. Also extracts EPF, PRS, Charity (check LHDN for tax-exemption status), Life and Medical insurance tax relief, easing your income tax filing.

Template - contains sections available for copy to the input sheets and EF.
For example, in category "Default (adv)" there are 4 template rows you can copy:
Weekly category:
1. Column R > Configure amount.
2. Provided formula will fill the total monthly amount accordingly.

Monthly category:
1. Fill amount in the month where the payment starts/changes.
2. Provided formula will fill the subsequent months.
3. To revert #1, replace by pasting (Ctrl+C > Ctrl+V) formula from any column D:O.

Bimonthly category:
1. Column R > Configure amount.
1b. [Optional] Column B > Tick to count on even months (Feb, Apr...)
1c. [Optional] Override with manual input in any month.
2. Provided formula will fill all/subsequent months.
3. To revert #1c, replace by pasting (Ctrl+C > Ctrl+V) formula from any column D:O.

Quarterly category:
1. Column R > Configure amount.
1b. [Optional] Column B > Change starting month by replacing default 1 (Jan) with any month number.
1c. [Optional] Override with manual input in any month.
2. Provided formula will fill all/subsequent months.
3. To revert #1c, replace by pasting (Ctrl+C > Ctrl+V) formula from any D:O column.


Data - for spreadsheet formulas, please keep it hidden and untouched.

Latest update:
This post has been edited by Takudan: Jan 3 2025, 12:19 AM

In case anyone's interested to know my motive, here's my background story:
About me


History



This post has been edited by Takudan: Jun 16 2021, 03:09 PM

Awesome doc. Appreciated that you included changelog.

Thanks man. I realised there's more to write about the fine details because they might look pretty cryptic to someone who stumbles upon the sheet for the first time... So I'll need your/the public's help to identify those haha

You can befriend polarbearz soon!

thanks for the effort.

Thanks a lot

polarbearz also create and share useful templates? (genuine question, not sarcasm)

Yup. Hers is more focused on investment returns and is the one I use extensively to keep track of my investment return.

https://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopi...&#entry98487565

https://ringgitfreedom.com/resources/my-exc...tfolio-summary/

Omg, it's almost like I'm shadowing her footsteps HAHA. And I was totally going to ask, why Excel and not Google spreadsheet, and she answered it in her blog lol.

I was wondering if there's possibility of linking to hers but... Honestly mine is more on general management and much less details on the investment portion, there won't be anything worth porting. Two very different spreadsheets serving very different purposes, both grew from very docile creature to a monstrous blob full of dirty codes in the background.

Excellent! Thanks man.

(also added to first post)

What does it mean to have a good plan?
The sheet contains various conditional formatting to tell you whether there's something good/bad. In general, I use the traffic light colouring: red is bad, yellow is "almost there", green is good. Let's look at some of the details below.

Summary > ending balance
You may notice red/yellow indicators.
Red means you have not enough for the next month. The sheet tracks your budget monthly and that strictly means from first day to last day of the month, e.g. 1-29 February 2020, 1-30 June 2021 etc. Having that said, it does not have the level of detail to tell you how much you're spending by day; this sheet cannot tell you how much you will spend on 20 June, and how much you will have left by the end of that day. What this sheet does however, is that it assumes all your expenses are clocked in on day 1 of the month, and your salary comes in much later. This means, in order to have a healthy plan, you need to have enough ending balance on the month before, to cover for the next month, e.g.
Income = 10k
Jan ending balance = 2k
Feb expense = 5k
Result > Jan ending balance is shown as red, as it is NOT enough to cover for Feb expenses. It assumes that Feb's income will not come on time.
Note:
- pay day configured in FD is only to help you decide when you should set your monthly FDs up to spread your maturity dates across the month, to have a healthy "money ready at any point of the month" plan. Putting it at day 1 does not change the assumption that you still need to have ending balance more than next month's expense, disregarding your income. Again, I admit this is an over-engineered feature and you may ignore the calendar configuration if it is not applicable to you.
- investments are not calculated as part of the expenses. This sheet assumes that your investments will be done AFTER your pay day of the month, so that in case you have extra expenses, the first outflow you can cut is your investment, without affecting the your life comforts i.e. the essentials and nonessentials. This is to provide more flexibility for you to manage for when you get your huge bonus for the month, that you want to do the investment in the same month itself, without hurting your KPI directly (i.e. red ending balance indicators even though you know it's fine).

Yellow means you have too much idle cash; the current threshold/formula = your income * 2. This sheet intends to facilitate investments/savings. The ending balance is meant to kept at a healthy "just enough" level, while allowing you to slowly "plant your money tree" to save for the rainy days. As you start your journey in financial planning, investment will eventually come into the picture because money depreciates; you need to let the power of compounding help cushion the fall. Meaning, you need to let your money generate more money for you. But it does not have to be risky investments that do not fit your appetite; that is all up to you, and it is completely up to you to decide where you will keep your extra cash -- all you have to do is jot that down under Investment tab. I have yet to figure out a good way to visualise extraction your invested money to cover for sudden shortfalls.

Summary > buying power
This answers "how much can I splurge this year?" Notice the value never exceeds a certain point even though your ending balance is much higher -- this is because the amount you can splurge is not simply the ending balance, but it also takes account of:
- how much you're supposed to invest up to that month
- how much needed for subsequent month expenses
Note: having 3,000 buying power on March, but 2,000 on April, means that you're NOT supposed to YOLO spend all 3,000 on March itself. Because, in doing so, you will end up in 1,000 deficit once you enter April, as indicated by the red ending balance if you add a 3,000 expenditure.

Summary > Target savings
Dictated by your % target based on your income.
Green = target reached
Yellow = almost there
Red = far from target
This is completely up to you. You ought to balance this out with your expenses and buying power, so that you can have a comfortable life for yourself, while not forgetting to save. The sheet guides you by telling you result of your configurations and inputs, but ultimately, you're the one deciding how much you should save, or spend.

Version 17
Start: new "Clear all data" macro to let you start your own without the noise from sample data.
Upgrade script: now supports migration of
1) protected sheet/range information.
2) Input sheets grouping and hidden columns settings
(no more known issue as of now, but hey let me know!)

Feel free to drop me a PM or post here if you require any support on using this spreadsheet, or even your expenditures management (please only share what you think is okay to share to a stranger). Note that I am not capable and will not provide investment advice.

Hope this gives you a peace of mind knowing how you're doing financially, to navigate better in these hard times.

This post has been edited by Takudan: Jul 5 2021, 01:25 AM

Just saw this post by chance!! Didn't get the @tag notification

Must say this is indeed a very comprehensive personal finance tracker, covering almost all the important aspects to manage ones' personal finance. Mine is all over the place as I use different app/sheets for different purpose

Thank you! Soooo what's stopping you trying out the sheet? I'd love to hear what you have to see what more I can add onto the sheet.

lol for me, the scripts ain't so bad, but what's scary is the cell formulas that I have to cram everything into that one multi-line text box that doesn't have easy indentations, especially conditional formatting that can fit a whole formula in it but they only give you a single line text box to work with.

I scared to use so many macros. Mine is structured like this:
-a ledger sheet of inflows and outflows
-a sheet to reconcile ledger to bank statements and investments
-pivot tables to summarise the ledger cash flow & net worth by month & year
-one sheet for each category of investment so that I can record the latest market value each month

Oh, the macros are only used for upgrading/migration, i.e. when you want to take the latest changes from template. If you only take the current version and don't want to use macros to upgrade in the future, you can just delete the buttons haha (right click, else left clicking will execute the macro instead).
Sounds like your system mainly tracks past records in detail, unfortunately that is not what this sheet is good at... I'm curious to know though, how do you plan for your future budget?

I don't have huge purchases planned, so my future budget I just use this for next 50 years:
https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement

thanks TS

Interesting, I've been working on a retirement calculator separately too, maybe I'll see how I can incorporate that into this spreadsheet too

How it looks like right now:


Each row denotes month, where
Increment rate applies yearly (12, 24...)
Inflation rate applies monthly.
But it's still flawed and WIP right now.... I can see right now I'm incorrectly "restarting" my expense at 5000 upon retirement lol.

I'm personally a huge fan of YNAB hence sticking with it for now
Huge fan of zero-based budgeting.

U very detailed & hard working - zero-based budgeting will kill me .

personally, i use Excel + "take-out savings for investing & buffer first" simplified budgeting
ie. i just put aside my net monthly income 20% or 80% windfall income (bonus) and use the rest, and if have extras at month end, throw more into savings for investing & buffer

my zero based got abit leeway one I track down to maybe ringgit / tens ringgit level and not down to cents level (eg my YNAB can never tie with my bank account balances)

I only use ynab to ensure that my big items & daily living spends are captured (eg salary, needs/wants, etc) as a form of check & balance. Because otherwise I will end up spending everything

How do you plan your one-time expenses then? Say... if you think you'd like to buy a new furniture, or travel overseas. Curious to see how everyone else plans their budget.

I find it so hard to wrap my head around this method lol. First it's something that is supposed to track things down to cents, but at the same time you're not. I googled to catch a glimpse of it, I see it has budget by month, but without dates - how are you ensuring you have your money ready at the right times of the month? Say, it's all budgeted to 0, but next month/budget, you have a lot of expenses coming in early but inflow would be at the end of the month? Does your budget sheet tell you how much you need to ready for the next month?

one time big expenses? if i planned any, it'll be accumulated monthly into my saving-for-spending pile.

FYI - i dont travel physically (hermit) + i buy large furniture/appliances like once in 10 to 15 years, even car, once in 15-22 years XD
eg. i'm only on my third & first brand new car

i used to be using that t-harv ekar method of:
50% for necessities
10% for savings
10% for fun / feel good
10% for education
10% for long-term saving to spend (big ticket items)
10% for charity / do good
very useful for targeting, control & visualization
BUT
pain in the butt when accumulated the discipline to spend way lower than i earn (10+ years to do so),
thus
switched over to simplified save net salary of 20% for investing & buffering (80% if windfall), then spend the rest carefully + if any extras month end put into investing & buffering.

note - all passive income are reinvested or form part of my cache for investing. above is just for net salary & net bonus (i'm worker ant je)

now, close to retirement, already put in my papers - semi-FIRE at 49.
soon i'll be spending 80% of my dividends & reinvesting 20% of them.

hope the above helps - IMHO, we just gotta find something that works for our personal characteristics AND before even that, have a BURNING WHY to do so (budgeting/cash flow management +financial planning & execution). Without the WHYs, no point, no reason thus blah blah blah whatever (ie. wont be a priority thus keep failing it)

This post has been edited by wongmunkeong: Jul 16 2021, 11:16 AM

just thinking, will any just in case black swan events,...mkts crashed n stayed bad for few years,...will the dividend be impacted as you need 80% from it for your retirement expenses?

This post has been edited by MUM: Jul 16 2021, 11:37 AM

yeah, agreed.
Be prepared for the worse, hope for the best

My calc is based on 2/3 of my 2020 dividends & i've cash backup based on flexi mortgage re-drawal + SSPN if needed

good reserves...
but if your are retired,...after having "withdrawed" for those to supplement,....
i am just concerned of the method of replenishing those

there's where the long game is - other than dividend stocks & REITs, also holding "normal equities" + didnt count stuff like SSPN % and cash backs XD

Wow, not bad with so much charts and graphs.

so it is more to just this then "soon i'll be spending 80% of my dividends & reinvesting 20% of them".

Not the guy you replied to, but I use YNAB as well.

I have various categories of discretionary spending like Fun Money and Stuff I forgot to Budget For (this is very important as a residual catch-all), so those categories are used sparingly for big one-offs to annualize the costs. Fun Money includes travel for me, so if I'm allocating RM500 a month for that, I'll be able to spend RM6,000 on travel if I don't spend it anywhere else.

Re: Early-in-the-month expenses, the trick is to always live on last month's salary. Using this trick will also allow you to keep a 5 month emergency fund rather than 6.

This post has been edited by S_SienZ: Jul 16 2021, 01:28 PM

Oh actually yes, that's exactly what I do too, in this spreadsheet. Ending balance needs to be more than the next month's total expenses, else you get a red alert. Didn't think about that trick part but I guess now I can +1 month when I tell people how many months of savings I have haha.

Well the idea of YNAB as I understand it, is to have every penny working on something, be it your (future) expenses, or investments. Setting aside some placeholder pot of money sounds counterintuitive especially if you set up multiple of them, but then they're not actually being used in that exact category... It's like later on you need to do a mental math that the RM 6000 you're about to spend on the travel, was already paid for by your past 1 year savings into the Fun Pot.

For my method, though, you can plan out your future travel by simply plotting that RM 6000 on June 2022, and then see the summary telling you how your budget would look like, all the way from now to the end of that year (strictly speaking you'd need 2 sheets for this example as of my post now, but yes, there is cross-sheet linking feature already).

So, I'm starting to understand more now why is it so difficult to convince someone to change their ways of managing their finances, if they already have a system: because the process is so different, it's hard to adapt! I definitely would not want to use that app 😂

I guess over the years I've developed workarounds for it which like you said formed a system - I prefer an annualized view of costs (in fact I often do this in my head when buying a large ticket item, divide by 12) as it allows me to have a fixed budget every month regardless of one-off purchases, this takes out a lot of decision making fatigue which is valuable to someone who is prone to analysis paralysis like myself. About money not being "used", I usually park those categories of funds in Stashaway Simple (MMF) so that it is technically "working" in the meantime.

Started using YNAB 4 in 2015 before that was using excel too Excel is a good tool but for tedious tracking is difficult to achieve what I want and all my balances in YNAB is reconcile to my bank/cc balance.

YNAB has help a lot from the day I started using till now, if based back on my salary in 2015 my emergency/savings now is worth 4 years of salary before that I don't even have 5k savings.

If based on my income now, my emergency/savings is around 1.5 years only.

I don't track daily expenses anymore as most of the daily expenses is paid through ewallet. For big ticket items I will always paid by installments and this the reason I never separate my pots for different purpose.

I do used excel to track my investments and the new YNAB I personally feel is not that flexible compare to the one I'm using.

It's been a while - my latest update throws away the clunky big FD sheet, replacing it with EF (emergency funds). It's much more flexible and easier to use. Mainly catered towards increased use of more short term investments aside from FD where its interest rate has been disappointing.

More details in my 2nd post happy planning!

Question/Survey:
I'd like to add a functionality to easily increase budget for multiple categories due to inflation, however I realised it's not easy because inflation is not one-size-fits-all; food inflation feels like at least 10%, but it's not as painful elsewhere.

So initially, I wanted to
- configure the inflation %
- choose which categories I want to apply the inflation % to
- run as a one-off, upon rolling out new annual budget for the next year (or just apply it to current year because fuck 2022 inflations!)

But what I have in mind above feels awkward due to the reason I mentioned earlier, it's like an overkill feature I'd rather just manually look through my budget sheet and adjust with a calculator on the side.

So... What do you think about such a feature? Would it be a nice to have? What other ideas do you have for such functionality, or what's your wishlist?

Hello it's been a long while! 20230422 update sempena Hari Raya: Version 20 and 21!
- Updated based on LHDN table for YA 2022: https://www.hasil.gov.my/en/individual/indi...me/tax-reliefs/
- Added Tax-exempt Gifts section in [NonEssentials], which is also extracted by [Setup] for the corresponding [Income Tax - Reliefs] calculation.
- Removed deprecated sheet [FD] and all references to it. Added script to force recalculate current sheet in case of Upgrade macro timeout.
- Known performance issue: Upgrade macro tends to exceed 6-minute timeout, resulting in incomplete process (upgrade failure). I will look into improvements.

20230701 update (version 23):
Updated sheets
1. [Summary]:
- Income and Expenses: added two subcategories each as grouped rows.
- Summary chart: now visualises income and expenses into two sub-categories.
- Cumulative summary: separated starting balance for clarity.
- Removed 3rd chart that became redundant.
- Debit/Credit weightage: new and improve section (replacing "Categories %" and Income distribution). Debit (money in) vs. Credit (money out) is visualised in a balanced sheet: rows of the same colour will aggregate to exactly 100%.
2. [Upgrade]: updated mappings to latest version.
3. [Net Worth Summary]: Fixed formula

Updated scripts:
- appsscript.json - Fixed authentication requirement
- General - added GetTabColor function to fix deprecated code
- macros - fixed "Clear all data" script to clean up template correctly.
- Upgrade - improved performance by grouping spreadsheet rows/columns manipulations. Also refresh more fields.

----
There should be no more performance issue with upgrade macro now

20231108 update (version 25):
Revamped EPF input:
- [Income]*: EPF by employer/employees rows, they are automatically added to [Investment].
- [Investment]* added EPF, automatically extract from [Income] and can deposit/withdraw more. Note: Upgrade does not automatically add these new rows, so you must add them yourself according to the template.
- [Income Tax - Insurance]: removed support for EPF.
- [Income Tax - Relief]: replaced EPF with extraction from [Investment], just like PRS.
Notes:
- *Upgrade does not automatically add these new rows, so you must add them yourself according to the template.
- As per existing behaviour, new investment rows will be reflected in [Net Worth Summary] automatically, but you will need to shift your rows accordingly.
- Tip: for private sector workers receiving monthly EPF, you might want to revise your target saving/investment %, because inclusion of EPF will increase your percentage considerably.

Updated sheets:
1. [Upgrade] "To" column now refers to template instead, so that every upgrade, there would be a snapshot of the previous version's cell as "From". This will take effect moving forward.
2. [Summary] Formatting, and swapped column A to T - ensure A29 is migrated to T29 in Upgrade sheet.
3. [Net Worth Summary] Fixed formula.

Updated scripts:
- CustomFunctions: new script containing custom functions built for use.
- Upgrade: updated formula refresh script reflecting EPF update.

Known issues: force refresh step during upgrade removes non-formula cell values. Please copy from the backup sheets to get the values back.

20241102 update (version 26):
- Updated based on LHDN table for YA 2023: https://www.hasil.gov.my/en/individual/indi...me/tax-reliefs/ <-- I actually did this half a year ago but I wanted to add more changes but totally dropped the ball
- Added formatting on input sheets to automatically mark formula cells.
- Minor aesthetics (URL to chips)
- [NonEssentials]*: new "Allowance" above Buy list for better visibility on purchasing power.
Notes:
- *Upgrade does not automatically add these new rows, so you must add them yourself according to the template.

Macros:
- Added JYeneral library, my personal collection of common scripts.

Known issues:
- force refresh step during upgrade removes non-formula cell values. Please copy from the backup sheets to get the values back.
- "clear data" function currently does not clear all data from the template cleanly. You will need to fix the rest manually.

Keep up the good work!

20241215 update (version 27):
New:
1. [Template] contains sections available for copy to the input sheets and EF. List of templates below - more details refer to sheet:
- Default
- Default (adv) - contains advanced formula that helps prefill weekly, monthly, bimonthly or quarterly rows.
- Emergency funds
- Essentials
- Non-essentials
- Income
- Investment
- Travel
- Subsection

Updates:
1. [Setup]: updated Legend to reflect templates.
2. [Upgrade]: "To" column formula is now individualised per row.
3. Input sheets:
- removed redundant <Template> section as they are now in the [Template] sheet.
- sample data overhauled to use latest templates.
4. [EF]: removed redundant rows including <Template> section and empty rows as they are now in the [Template] sheet.

Macros:
- Adjusted macro list and shortcuts
- Refactored across all files
- Updated [Clear all data]: fixed and improved to support clearing to base state. Additionally, some template sections are added to help pre-fill the sheets.
- New [Input sheet: new section]: user to fill in name of template to add, which adds a section based on a match in [Template] or otherwise default.
- New [EF: new section]: adds a new EF section based on [Template].
- JYeneral library updated to enable adding sections based on a template.
- New file - Templates, Util

Note: I recommend starting from template for the new year to enjoy the new look and feel. Otherwise, upgrading existing sheet will require additional adjustments.

Known issues:
- force refresh step during upgrade removes non-formula cell values. Please copy from the backup sheets to get the values back.

20241231 update (version 28):
Updates:
1. [Setup]:
- new configuration "Target saving: exclude fixed investments?", default TRUE because it is more intuitive to exclude non-take-home pay e.g. EPF mandatory contributions to set targets.
- Dec Year-1 ending balance: updated formula
2. [Income]:
- "Fixed income" is now known as "Definite income".
- New section "Fixed investment" that is excluded from target investment calculation by default (configurable).
3. [Summary]:
- Added Income subsection and adjusted charts accordingly.
- Adjusted formulas relating to investment calculations, including buying power, investment target etc.
- Shifted non-essentials section above investment.
- DR/CR weightage is now always aligned left so it is more intuitive to see how CR overlaps against DR.
4. [Template]:
- Removed excessive notes and shifted note guidance to the input cell.
- Added more categories to some sections.
5. Input sheets: updated same data to reflect latest template.
6. [Upgrade]: "target saving" T29 shifted to T30.

Known issues:
- force refresh step during upgrade removes non-formula cell values. Please copy from the backup sheets to get the values back.


Author's note: I found myself disliking the excessive notes in Templates and that I struggled to talk to others telling my % savings when my sheet takes account of the EPF mandatory investment that is not take-home pay - nobody really looks at that when trying to figure out how much to save (say, the common 50/30/20 rule), but it makes sense to take account of them as a whole especially when evaluating your overall income in case you want to change job, and/or investment values to assess your net worth.

Happy new year and may you ever be financially wiser for 2025 and beyond!

This post has been edited by Takudan: Jan 3 2025, 12:19 AM

interesting template