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MY AFFINITY FOR spreadsheets began in the late 1960s when I was a paperboy in Virginia Beach. I had a morning route for The Virginian-Pilot and an afternoon route for the now-defunct Ledger-Star. I used my Huffy bicycle with huge baskets front and back.
The business model was straightforward. I paid wholesale for the papers, and customers paid the retail price of 35 cents per week, or 55 cents if they also got the Sunday paper. I collected payments every two weeks, and the company provided a book with pre-printed receipts that could be torn out when a customer paid. Each receipt was smaller than a postage stamp.
My homemade spreadsheet helped me keep track of my small business. Customers who didn’t pay promptly were particularly irksome. A quick glance showed how the bottom line was directly affected. Deadbeats were rare, and I cut off a few, quickly learning the importance of follow-through with customers to make the enterprise worthwhile. I learned valuable lessons about people, human nature and work ethic.
My fondness for spreadsheets didn’t end there. For many years, I’ve tracked our family’s net worth. A year-end hard copy goes in the filing cabinet. Everything has a category:
The separation into categories is a reminder that money in a tax-free account is worth more than the same sum in a tax-deferred or taxable account. We know that the U.S. Treasury is, in most cases, a future owner of a portion of the dividends and capital gains from those accounts.
It’s satisfying to see the change in the net worth statements over many years. Despite the inevitable market downturns, we’ve enjoyed impressive long-term growth. Net worth is often defined as assets minus liabilities. We’re lucky enough to be debt-free these days, so the liabilities column is blank. Call me crazy, but I pay off my credit card balances every morning. Yes, every morning.
You may have noticed I don’t include the value of vehicles. They only depreciate, and it’s too depressing.
Our checking account gets balanced every morning with the help of a spreadsheet designed for that purpose. We write very few checks, but there are plenty of online payments, always accompanied by a debit entry in this spreadsheet.
I have a spreadsheet for recording monthly income and expenses. There’s also a tax spreadsheet, useful for projecting yearly estimated income totals. Goals include staying in a certain tax bracket, making Roth conversions and avoiding those pesky IRMAA cliffs.
My various Excel spreadsheets are useful, but they pale compared to the tools available at Morningstar and Vanguard. Among my favorites is the Morningstar Portfolio Manager, where re-arranging the data is a snap. Securities can be sorted by criteria including total returns, holding periods, dividend yields, expense ratios and more.
I like the cost basis resources on the Vanguard website, useful most recently for tax-loss selling. It’s easy to sort the data in the spreadsheets Vanguard provides, and use specific ID to find the securities we want to unload in our taxable accounts. The cost basis tools are also great for hunting for securities with large gains to send to our donor-advised fund.
As I close in on age 70, the spreadsheet with the greatest impact is one devoted to my health. I’m not tremendously overweight, but nobody’s confusing me with George Clooney, either. I step on the scale each morning at about 6 a.m. The number is dutifully recorded by date. My spreadsheet tells me daily and weekly losses, average weekly loss, and percentage of total beginning weight that has been lost. Blood pressure and pulse readings are included.
I find all this quite inspiring. The knowledge that a morning weigh-in looms, with a number recorded for all time, keeps me from mindless eating the night before.
And I’m walking much more these days, in my ongoing effort to avoid using one of those crypts. My phone somehow knows how many steps I’ve taken, total distance traveled and more. I think that information is destined for my spreadsheet.
Steve Skillman lives in Southport, North Carolina. He’s a retired high school band director and arts administrator. Steve spends his time playing the French horn in four regional orchestras and building sets for the local community theater.
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Spreadsheet aficionados: curious if you have used Tiller (https://www.tillerhq.com/). Program is based on Google spreadsheets or Excel. Would like to hear your feedback.
Of all the possible retirement activities, playing with spreadsheets is one of the ones I have heard mentioned most seldom. If someone can’t figure out anything to do in retirement, perhaps spreadsheets have not yet been considered.
Personally, If I wanted to play more with spreadsheets, I think I’d take a part time job with an accounting firm or volunteer at the library :-).
However, it reminds me of my late father-in-law, whom I loved very much. He kept daily records of share prices on legal pads, even though he happily bought the computer I picked for him so he could trade online at a discount broker. He always understood the numbers and trends better than I and perhaps you do, too, because of your time with those spreadsheets!
Hmmm – I’m in the same age-range as the author, but my habits are about 150-degrees opposite. I have an excel spreadsheet for investments, updated quarterly (part of the “don’t peek” habit). And another for certain collectibles, with rough values that my heirs may care about but I don’t, because I’m not selling.
I’m fortunate to have adopted the running habit 40 years ago, and still able to hit the trail a few times a week. The “spreadsheet” for that is purely internal and “updated” daily: If more than a couple days have passed I start delivering mental butt-kicks. At some point nature will decree the running be replaced by brisk walks. When that’s no longer possible it will become a long-or-short coast to the end, with blessings to count either way.
In a galaxy long ago I was also fortunate to use one of my college electives to take a Nutrition 220 class in the School of Nursing. Among other things it equipped me with the real-deal basics regarding daily requirements for calories, protein, micronutrients, etc. (It also armed me against the mountains of BS on each of those, and numberless whacky, hyped-up alternative diets.)
So my daily internal nutrition “spreadsheet” is being aware in very-round numbers of total calories consumed, with approximate numbers for grams of protein, carbs and lipids – and that’s about it. If I fall-short or exceed the appropriate amounts for my size and desired weight I just make it up the next day or two.
I’m scratching my head for others, but I think that’s about it. Different strokes – and that’s fine with me!
I use an app called Happy Scale, which tracks daily/weekly trends—good since daily weights can fluctuate, so one reading doesn’t tell you that much. If my moving average over the week is going down (green arrow), I know I’m on the right track. I’m not as enamored with spreadsheets (or paper) as you seem to be, but Happy Scale does allow exporting of data to a spreadsheet.
I got my first Apple Watch in 2021, and I love having the information about moving and steps. I’m often surprised with how many steps I get just from regularly daily activity. I’d thought of myself as fairly sedentary, but it turns out I’m not, really.
Cronometer is a useful app for tracking food, weight, and other metrics. Quicken tracks my financial accounts. Spreadsheets take care of everything else such as rebalancing, tax loss harvesting, and taxes.
Pretty impressive, though way beyond what I have the energy to do. Keeping track of financial stuff that matters is fine. Consider cutting back on the health measurements, this kind of information can make you worried unnecessarily. Unless there is a specific medical reason to follow your health measurements, just relax and let up.
Excel is the Sawzall of personal finance tools. Love it! I especially love the newish feature which looks up current price or a slew of other metrics for nearly any tradable symbol. Goodbye manual data entry for portfolio calculations.
Steve, I enjoyed this….and wow. I thought I was OCD but your routine makes me feel almost normal.
I use spreadsheets to track my investment accounts and an ancient version of Quicken to balance my checking and credit card accounts. I use an old version of FitDay to track food and weight. A “books” spreadsheet lists every book I’ve read since 2005, with a numerical rating.
A quick read of this article and I concluded this fellow is just like me. My approach to finances is quite similar. And then I reread and found you have beaten me by a mile – balance checking account daily? I haven’t balanced a checkbook in thirty years and these days my income is exactly the same each month except if a SS COLA hits.
You certainly enjoy playing with numbers -more power to you, but doesn’t all your tracking require a great deal of data input to the spreadsheet?
I let the bank do the debit and credits and send me a e-mail with my balances or if a balance goes below a pre-set point.
Years ago I tracked net worth on a spreadsheet, but gave up. Once I consolidated investments with Fidelity and linked bank accounts and entered home value, Fidelity updates my net worth every day. My only effort is if I change real estate value which is rare.