My Approach To Personal Financial Manage

How I Manage My Personal Finances

Introduction

My philosophy of personal financial management is that people are like nano-businesses; we need to earn more than we spend to survive. Most people have 1-2 income streams, while the hard and smart workers have a few more, but how many expenditure streams do we have? Well, this depends on what stage you're at in your life. I currently have 9 mandatory expenses each month, but a married couple with a mortgage, 2 cars, 3 kids, and a dog could have +20 per month, if not more, hence the importance of keeping a finance tracker.

This page shows how I manage and forecast my finances using a custom finance tracker I created.

Screenshot of my Finance Tracker

Screenshot of my Savings Goals Gantt Chart

The Situation

Having grown frustrated of the guessing game of not knowing what I needed saved for when, I created a custom finance tracker to help me plan, save, and forecast for the future.

My finance tracker needed to includ the following sections:

Weekly income streams.
Monthly fixed expenses.
Weekly saving accounts lodgements for my different savings goals.
Saving account withdrawals.
Weekly investment account lodgements into Trading 212.
Play money (day-to-day) expense tracker.
Forecasts for each section and expected dates.

My Action

The Rules

Before building the budget I set out some basic rules for myself. Being a fan of Dave Ramsey, my plan was to follow The 7 Baby Steps which act as a proven guide for effective money-management.

Emergency fund: Save €1,000 for my starter emergency fund. Thankfully, I had this in my current account at the time. I utilised Revolut's pocket features to quickly create an account for my emergency fund.
Pay off all debt: Luckily I've none! So I moved onto the the next one.
Save 3-6 months of expenses: Here's where the problems came in. I didn't know how much I need for 3-6 months expenses.

The Preparation

In order to effectively calculate my 3-6 month expenses, I broke down my monthly expenses and annual expenses (i.e. my Savings Goals), so if I were to be in a situation where I wasn't earning, I could sustain my monthly expenses and saving's goals' lodgements.

Monthly Expenses: This included different subscriptions I have such as my phone bill, Eflow, YouTube Premium etc., and dates they usually are due. It requires a bit of time scrolling through bank statements, but unsurprisingly, I found a bunch of subscriptions I want's using or didn't need, which were cancelled.
Annual Expenses: These were the big things I needed to save for such as my car insurance, gym subscription, the Wix subscription for this website etc., and when they're next due.
My Income: Lastly, I calculated my monthly income. I could now calculate the weekly deposits needed to to achieve my savings goals on time.

Savings Goals

Having identified what my Savings Goals are, my monthly expenses, annual expenses, and monthly income; I calculated what I needed to allocate to each savings account per month to achieve the goal 1 week before it was due:

Excel Vs. Budgeting Apps

I decided to use Excel over a budgeting app for the simple reason of demonstrating financial discipline. Stuck onto my wall, above my Personal Mission Statement, I have a quote from Dave Ramsey's book Baby Step Millionaires:

This quote lies as the foundation of my budget, and since I began my budget back in 2023, I haven't broken any of the key rules! I like to have it stuck on my wall as it acts as a constant reminder what's required of me each day to achieve realistic financial freedom.

For me, the hardest part of managing a budget is the day-to-day expenses, and this takes practices and discipline. I was afraid that if I used an app like YNBA, where transactions are automatically allocated, I would loose focus of my limits and accidently splurge. Building a budget from scratch using Excel requires a conscious understand every action and transfer. If it doesn't balance, why? Hence demonstrating financial discipline.

However, I recently learned that this isn't the best option for everyone. Take my Mum for example, a single mother with 2 jobs, 3 kids, 3 dogs, 1 cat, countless bills, and more! For her, building a finance tracker is too much to manage. Using Excel presents the risk of mis-managing the expenses, leading to incorrect calculations and ultimately inaccurate forecasts. For her, an app like YNBA is much more effective as she can link her bank cards, taking away the manual input, leading to exact expense calculations without the risk of any errors.

Building The Budget

NOTE: Not the actual figures from my budget. That wouldn't be a smart move on my part ;)

1. Monthly Income

My budget is structured with the actual amounts in white fill and the expected amounts in light blue fill. This allows me to forecast for the month, knowing exactly how much and when my income is supposed to come in.

2. Fixed Expenses

Next we have my fixed expenses (monthly expenses).

3. Savings Accounts Lodgements

This section is where I track my saving accounts lodgements. Every Friday, when I get paid, the first thing I do is allocate the required amount to each saving account on Revolut. When I first started my budget, I did 1 group of transfers per month but found this put me under a lot of pressure, constantly making sure I have enough in the account to make the lodgement at the end of the month. I quickly learned that you should save at the same rate you get paid i.e. if you get paid weekly, then you lodge weekly, if you get paid monthly then you lodge monthly. By dividing my lodgements into weekly payments, revolutionised my finance tracker and made it easier to manage the most difficult bit, the day-to-day expenses.

4. Savings Accounts Withdrawls

I included this section in my budget for balancing purposes. I realised that when an annual expense needed to be paid, I had no where to track the expense without off-setting the budget summary (we'll look at this bit later). I included a withdrawals table which adds my Savings Account withdrawal to my Total Income Received column in the budget summary, which can then be allocated as an expense in the Play Money (day-to-day expenses) section, thereby correctly balancing the Net Balance with the figure in my current accounts.

This is a relatively new section in my budget and is one I'm still figuring out, hence why its sounds so confusing. As I'm reading back over this section, I'm thinking there has to be an easier way to track it... roll on CFP study!

5. Investments

This section is where I track my lodgements into my Trading 212 account. Every week I lodge €50 into the account which is then used to invest in different stocks and EFTs (Trading 212 charge 0.07% commission, 1.07% x €50 = €50.35). This is where I demonstrate the "invest consistently and wisely" rule from above, but sometimes I'm defiantly not investing wisely... but that's the learning curve and as my Grandad always says "that's the fun of investing." Debatable...

6. Play Money Calculations & Forecasts

This is where my Play Money calculations come in. I use the Amount Expected columns from each section listed above and subtract them from my monthly income, leaving me with my surplus figure. This is then used as my Play Money for the month.

This section also allows me to see what percentage of my income goes where. Its important to note, the percentages in the image below do not reflect my actual budget. My real budget usually follow the following allocated percentages:

Fixed Expenses = 19.06%
Savings Accounts = 43.33%
Investments = 16.72% (Invest 15% of income rule from above)
Play Money = 20.88%

Not my actual %

7. Play Money Tracking

The Play Money section is the most challenging part of the budget due to manually tracking each expense. This requires constant discipline and attention to detail. One challenge I constantly face is the Bank of Ireland online banking app where transactions are categorised by In Progress and Completed. This can be really frustrating, when I log different day-to-day expences in the Play Money section of my budget, the current account sum doesn't instantly equal the Net Balance sum, unlike Revolut where transactions are immediately taken from your current account sum. To work around this issue, I put pending transactions (In Progress transactions) in orange on my budget to highlight the discrepancy.

I also include a Remaining sum at the top which is linked to the Play Money Calculations discussed previously. This acts as a monitor of how much I can spend before negative cash flow. As I insert transactions, the Remaining sum goes down.

8. The Budget Summary

This is a summary of each table in the budget, and acts as my dashboard. The starting balance is the same as the net balance from the previous month, this allows me to easily continue on at the beginning of the next month. As I mentioned before the hardest part of the budget is managing the Play Money, which ultimately make balancing the Net Balance with the figures in my current account challenging. This problem is eliminated by demonstrating the financial discipline rule and logging every transaction as I go. There's nothing worse than being at your desk for hours trying to figure out why your Net Balance is off by €0.14 because you forgot to log something you bought in the shop, trust me!

Savings Goals Tracker

My Savings Goals tracker is a new section I included in my 2025 Finance Tracker. I became frustrated with not having a clear visual of when my savings goals where going to be completed. I created a interactive Gantt Chart on Excel using on of the provided templates. This Gantt Chart moves with today's date and is scrollable using the slider beside the Display Week. I use this chart to start start planning ahead. When I see a goal is nearly completed, I start calculating and planning for my next Savings Goal.

Conclusion

Developing my Finance Tracker has completely changed my life. I'll never forget that feeling when I first balanced everything, like a tonne of bricks being lifted off my shoulders.

The reason why I want to be a Financial Advisor and ultimately a Certified Financial Planner is to help people experience the same feeling I had that day. For me, having my budget balanced every night is better than any sleeping tablet on the market.

My budget is a working progress, there is definitely room for improvement. The biggest takeaway from my budgeting experience is that it doesn't matter how detailed your budget is, if you've bad spending habits. The organisation is 25% and the actions are 75%.