I've recently been playing with personal capital, which (assuming the same for mint) is a great way to get a quick snapshot with little work. That being said, I've long kept a personal set of sheets, and, like others have said, I'm of the opinion that this is the best way to firmly grasp your given situation. Mine are extremely personalized, moderately complex, and take up a few hours a month to maintain. You could argue that I spend too much time on them, but I enjoy it and it helps me stay focused. Due to how personalized they are, I won't share the actual sheets, but will attempt to layout in this crude format what they look like. If I ever get time, I may try to templatize and share. I apologize, this is going to be insanely long.
Sheet 1 - Bills
This one is a comparison of the current amount of cash in my checking accounts versus each major bill that will go out. It's somewhat inaccurate as certain bills have already been paid and accounted for in the current cash level, but it still works to give a quick shot of input versus output. I have two checking accounts, one for the majority of living expenses, the other for my mortgage, HELOC, and other remodeling expenses. The columns look like this:
Checking 1, Bill1, Bill2, etc., Checking 1 Expenses (sum), Checking 1 Remaining,
Checking 2, Mortgage, HELOC, etc., Checking 2 Expenses, Checking 2 Remaining,
Total Beginning (c1 + c2), Total Expenses, Total Remaining,
Debt Expenses, Living Expenses,
TH (take home) – Total Expenses, TH – Living Expenses
Then there are various columns to calculate retirement amounts based on current living expense amounts. Like the living expenses * 12 * 25 gives a retirement amount. The amount being saved * 12 to get yearly savings. Then the first divided by the second gives years till retirement. This is a stupidly crude calc since current savings and interest aren’t calculated at all.
Sheet 2 – Equity
Simply a monthly snapshot of every account balance. I don’t worry about the fact that the checkings are usually about to be depleted. It’s just a snapshot. The columns are:
Checking 1, Checking 2, IRA, Roth IRA, 401k, Money Market, Total Liquid Assets, Debt, Total Equity
Sheet 3 – Debt
Similar to the equity, this is a snapshot of every debt account balance. This won’t include my day-to-day cc unless I’m carrying over a balance. I’m carrying some remodel debt and I split things between short term (have to pay off in less than a year), mid term (stuff people would typically carry over longer or things that are hedged against house equity), and finally mortgage. I add some complexity to calc the amount that should be reduced every month based on a desired payoff date. The columns are:
Bal1, Bal2, etc, Short Term Bal, Bal3, Bal4, etc., Mid Term Bal,
Short + Mid Bal, Amt Pd in Month, Mnths to Payoff Date (has a fun formula: =(YEAR($L$1)-YEAR(A11))*12+MONTH($L$1)-MONTH(A11)),
Need to pay (how much should reduce to stay on track),
Mortgage, Mortgage Reduction, MR %,
Total Debt, Total Reduction, Avg Total Reduction,
Then, since I did a remodel and hope to have decent equity in my house, I have a whole series of columns to calc estimated sale, proceeds and subtract out all the debt, etc…
This has rows for each month that has occurred but also has projections for the future to help gauge if my plan will actually work.
Budget
This is a whole separate spreadsheet with multiple worksheets, is the newest to be added, and is by far the most complex. It’s not a complete view of my budget but just my one cc that is used for all living expenses like groceries, gas, entertainment, dining, etc. It is also the cc I use for company business expenses, mainly travel, which get reimbursed. I don’t budget these but simply filter them out since they’re not my expenses. There is a worksheet for each monthly cc statement. It’s simply the entire statement and I add a column for category and literally go through and type in a category value.
Then there is a summary worksheet. It is divided into a top half and bottom half with some summary and goal values in the middle.
The top half calcs the expenditures for each month for each category. There are implicit groupings for a higher categorization. For instance, the cats Dining, Booze, Entertainment can be lumped together as Stupid/Fun, while the cats Food, Clothes, Gas are lumped as Living. The columns are:
Yearly (Tot – Bus * 12), Tot – Bus (Business), Cat1, Cat2, etc., Business, Total,
Then the higher level cats: Stupid/Fun, Living, Random, Bills
Then the higher level cats again as percentages of the total.
The middle has four rows that correspond to the top columns: Average, Yearly Average, Budgeted, Yearly Budgeted.
The bottom half then compares the expenses per category against the amount budgeted for each category. The columns are all the same. The value for each column is the amount budgeted minus the amount spent, giving either the amount left or the amount over.
For the current month, whereby I will grab the statement periodically, usually weekly, I calc some things to give me an idea of where I’m at. For this, I have the following additional columns:
Days Left, % Days Left, % Money Left, Average Amount Spent Per Day, On Pace to Spend, Amount Can Spend Remaining Days