Very few books have changed the way I think as much as “Your Money or Your Life”.

I have developed an Excel spreadsheet to help me and my friends stay on top of our personal finances following the steps outlined in the book “Your Money or Your Life”. You can download it here: Your money or your life spreadsheet.

This post will describe what the spreadsheet does.

Home tab

Nothing much, just a splashscreen:

Lifetime earnings

This step consists of listing all the income you have generated throughout your life.

This step makes you realize that you can actually generate income but that if you mismanage it you don’t have much left.

Which brings us to the next tab.

Personal balance sheet

This step asks you to list everything you currently own or owe. You may realize that you actually own more than you expected 🙂

True hourly wage

This step looks at the time and money you spend for work related activities and how much you have at the end of the month.

You end up with a dollar per hour figure that can help you make buying decisions: “This restaurant will cost us $50, it represents 2 hours of work, is it worth it? Can we have a similar enjoyable experience somewhere cheaper?”.

Expense tracking

This step is about tracking every cents you spend every day for 30 days. This will raise your awareness of where your money goes.

No judging just tracking.

Expense adjustments

After one month of diligent expense tracking, you can go to the next tab, Expense adjustments:

After your expenses have been grouped, you judge whether the money you spent in each category was well spent. This will guide you to find where you should spend more of your money and where you should spend less (coffees everyday?).

Time to financial independence

And finally, the last step of the spreadsheet is about tracking how far you are from the crossover point, the point where your capital interests are higher than your living expenses.

I found this spreadsheet very useful for my personal use and I hope someone else reading this blog will find it useful as well!

Cheers,

Aymeric