Understanding and Tracking Your Finances with a Spreadsheet

Let’s say you want to start investing, creating an emergency fund, making provisions for current and future expenses, saving towards a goal, understanding your current financial position, and planning for the future. How do you keep track of your finances? How do you identify your expense pain points? While there are applications that can help with this, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of your financial standing through a spreadsheet that you create yourself. Everyone’s situation is different, but there is a foundation that we can all start from.

Fundamentals of Investing: An Emergency Fund

It is important that you see yourself as a company with a structure from earning money, to saving it, to budgeting for expenses and then investing. There should be room for liquidity first. The first step of creating an emergency fund is to try to estimate what your monthly expenses are. Your yearly rent should be factored too, divided into 12 and added to that estimated monthly expense, if you want to go overboard, you can assume you would be leaving the current place you stay in and add expenses for an agent fee or other house expenses associated with getting a new place. Divide this by twelve too and add it to the initially estimated expense.

Why Even The Most Elite Investors Do Dumb Things When Investing

If you’re Jeff Bezos, you’re not going to have some random dude manage your money and hope for the best. You’re not gonna open up a Robinhood account and risk it all on meme stocks like Gamestop. You’re going to hire the type of investor who has a PhD in mathematics and drives a Bugatti; a go-getter who wakes up with a turmeric latte and pores over satellite images of factories in Asia to predict the earnings of some 3D printing company most of us have never heard of. We’re talking about the best of the best in finance.

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