I receive a small but steady stream of requests from readers asking me how I manage my own investments.
So rather than telling you, I thought it’d be better be to show you.
I’ve spent a bit of time tidying it up to make it look presentable, and am now making my own tracking spreadsheet available for you to download.
I use it not only to track my investment performance, but to track my spending, net worth, and to work out my (UK) income tax.
What’s in the spreadsheet:
- An investment performance tracker
- A spending tracker
- A net worth tracker
- An income tax/NIC calculator
If you enter your salary, it’ll calculate your tax, NIC, and net pay for you.
If you enter your monthly spending, it’ll break your spending down for you.
If you enter your investment values, it’ll calculate your returns for you.
If you enter any other assets you hold, it’ll calculate your net worth for you.
Here’s a sample of the charts it produces:
My focus when putting it together was to make it easy to use. If you can understand an =SUM formula in Excel, then you’re fine. There’s nothing more complicated than that – no VLOOKUPs, no pivot tables, not even a SUMIF.
There are only two things to know before opening the spreadsheet:
- The light blue cells have formulas in them. They’re not complex formulas – they either just look at another cell in the spreadsheet, or are a total of the cells above it.
- All the data in there is made up. Everything in an un-coloured cell can be replaced with your own data.
It (hopefully) doesn’t require any more instructions than that – I’ve designed it to be self-explanatory, so you can start using it right away.
To give you an idea of what it looks like, here’s a screenshot of each tab:
You don’t have to use all the tabs – you can pick and choose which parts of the spreadsheet you might find useful. Each tab can function perfectly well by itself.
It’s a pretty simple spreadsheet, but I personally have found it to be an incredible help. I hope you do too.
One benefit of its simplicity is that it’s customisable, so feel free to add/remove as much as you like.
I also want to keep improving it, so please let me know if you have any suggestions by using the contact form.
If you’d like to receive your copy of the spreadsheet, you can do so by joining the Occam Investing community below. Your finances tracker will be contained in the welcome email: