I decided to teach myself how to use a Business Intelligence platform for professional development purposes. I do financial data consulting, and this is something I could cross-sell to my current clients. I chose to pick up PowerBI through some online courses.
Since there's no better way to learn than to create something useful, I decided to use PowerBI to track my personal finances. First, I got all of my finances in a spreadsheet using
https://www.tillerhq.com/. It's an Excel add-in that connects to your bank similar to Mint.
Then I built some cool visualizations on top of it. Currently, I'm tracking an FI date of around 2024, depending on how my assumptions hold up. The FI calculations will update as the value of my investments change, or my savings vary from my saving rate assumptions.
There's a few tabs I didn't attach for privacy purposes, but here's what I'm tracking:
1. Income vs. Expense by Category
2. My monthly and quarterly savings rate, with some big red flags if I miss my 50%+ savings rate target
3. A detailed expense tracker where I can drill into the details of where my money is going by category and by merchant.
4. A quarterly tracking of my Net Worth by account type (banking, investment, retirement, etc.)
5. Graphs of my projected investment balances and planned mortgage paydown.
6. An assumptions check to see if I've historically been saving as much as I've been assuming.
7 (Pending) A breakout of how much of my change in net worth is due to savings vs. investment gains
8. (Pending) Actual returns on investments