Back when we first started keeping track of finances we developed a spreadsheet in Google Docs titled Achieve Something that was designed to track income and expenses and encourage us to watch our spending. Over time the spreadsheet evolved into Achieve Something II, the spreadsheet we currently use each month and often link to when describing our net worth progress.
Achieve Something II is not really an "every dollar has a name" budget, its more of a tracking system that organizes our income and expenses and keeps us in check. Although pre-assigning income and developing a very tight budget is probably the best way to pinch every penny, we have found that if we relegate unnecessary spending to a "fun fund"and take a frugal approach to all other spending decisions, we achieve a similar result while maintaining flexibility.
Details:
Achieve Something II incorporates our idea of a Fun Tax, which automatically taxes 5% of all earned income and allocates this for miscellaneous entertainment, dining out, or other fun stuff (you know what is fun and what is not). We don't allocate a fixed balance of fun money each month, rather we set aside this 5% of what we earn and constantly replenish the fund when new income comes in. Less income means less spending.
We update Achieve Something II about every two weeks when a paycheck comes in, and then again at the end of the month.
Recently, we received several emails from our readers [Thank you for the feedback, we love it!] asking for access to the GoogleDoc, and decided create a downloadable template of the spreadsheet for everyone to use. So here is an excel version* of Achieve Something II in template form - feel free to download and customize to your own lifestyle, upload to your own GoogleDocs, or basically do anything at all.
*If you don't have excel please contact us and we can provide a Google Docs version directly.
Let us know if you have any questions, comments, or feedback.
