She created the Excel spreadsheet and it absolutely does everything we need it to. My wife is an engineer and much better at math than me. I manage all our finances from investments to taxable income to budget and more on excel sheets. Excel is capable of so many things it is truly amazing.
Any canned software is going to force you to conform to it and not the other way around.Īdd me in on this. Works exactly the way I want and should I desire another cut of the data, I just build that in. +3 - I have my built my own as well (multi-tabbed in excel). I collect expense data in Quicken and summarize these in the overall spreadsheet, especially annualized expenditures.
I've been rolling my own spreadsheet for several years now and include retirement simulations, overall analysis of funds and distribution, and can create "what if" scenarios as needed. The only way you can get your own unique analysis and outlook is to do it yourself in Excel. Do it monthly if you need more of a reminder. We take one day every quarter or so and download all transactions and plug them into our expenses categories to see how we did. Plenty of people here will tell you to use Mint or other similar programs/sites, but I am just not in favor of giving a third party all of my banking information.
It would take time, but building a spreadsheet would be the best.