“The Awakening”, Hains Point, Washington DC

OFF TOPIC

Summary: Download this spreadsheet to help you track and manage your finances.

I use a pretty detailed method for budgeting and tracking finances. I created an Excel spreadsheet in 1998 to help me understand where I’m spending my money, and I’ve continued to use it with minor tweaking and modifications throughout the years.

Today in 2008 we have many more opportunities for tracking our expenses, with a wide variety of online tools and websites that have much more power behind them.

However, I still use my own custom-designed method because, well, I’m used to it and its highly customizable. And when used with Google Spreadsheets, it works very well as an online budgeting and finance tracking tool.

So, click here to download the spreadsheet and test it out: if you don’t like it, that’s okay, but definitely use something. And we all know that planning a budget by tracking income and expenses is the first step to understanding your personal finances.

If you need help on how to use this or other financial analysis tools (for you and your companies), drop me a line (email, this web contact form, Twitter)…. I’m still an Excel geek at the end of the day.

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This spreadsheet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Derivs License. For details visit creativecommons.org.