

If you have irregular income, you could graph your income to see what months bring in the most income. If you have investments, then you could use a line graph to track your investment portfolio. So every time you put money into your savings, your savings column will automatically rise towards your target. The great thing about Excel is that if you change your data in your spreadsheet, your chart will automatically update to show the current data. If you are saving for something specific, you could chart the target amount that you need to save and your actual savings to date. If you are comparing actual expenses with budgeted expenses, for example, you could use a column chart to make the comparison. Once you know the basics, you can chart any information that you like. There are plenty of other charting options that I didn’t touch on here, have a play around to try out these option. You should always consult a qualified financial expert when making money decisions to tailor plans to suit your circumstances. In this blog, I share my savings and budget planning and what works for us. All figures are made up.ĭisclaimer: This is general information only. It condenses all those numbers down into a visual representation that has immediate meaning.įor this tutorial, I’ll be using the same budget spreadsheet as I used in the loan calculations tutorial. And I realised for the first time just how much of our income was going towards our mortgage.Ī sheet full of numbers is great, but for an instant idea of how your finances are, you can’t beat a graph.

I could see our finances for the first time. The numbers that had been staring me in the face for years suddenly jumped up and had meaning. It was just for fun really (I know, I need to get out more!), but what I found really surprised me. Just after we first bought our house, I decided to create some graphs. Previous to that, our budget was kept in a little exercise book. I have been keeping my budget in excel for four years now.
