How To Understand (and Create) A Personal Financial Statement Each Month In 5 Minutes
A lot of people shy away from any talk about “finance” or “accounting” because (1) its boring (2) it involves math and (3) its hard work.
Well it’s not as bad as you think. I’m going to show you how to understand financial statements in about 5 minutes. Then I’m going to give you some Excel templates to create your own. (See the video demo at the end.)
But first…
Why Should You Create A Personal Financial Statement?
If you wanted to lose weight, you’d have to weigh yourself right? If you wanted to be a great race car driver, you’d have to time your laps.
Well if you want to get rich (or become financially free), you have to create financial statements.
You are a business. You have money come in and you have money going out. You have things that you own and things that you owe.
If you don’t have a way to MEASURE progress and COMPARE what works and what doesn’t, then you are just wandering blindly in the dark.
Robert Kiyosaki talks a lot about this, how rich people are “financially literate” and how this should be taught in schools. That way we wouldn’t have so many Americans in credit card debt, losing their homes, and retiring flat broke only to become a burden on their families.
But that is another story. The thing to remember is that something MAGICAL happens when you start to measure your progress. Your success rate goes through the roof.
If you aren’t looking at your financials about once a month then you quite simply AREN’T serious about becoming rich. (You can pay a bookkeeper or accountant to do it as well if you don’t want to go through the process below.)
Understanding Financial Statements In 5 Minutes
I’ve tutored about a dozen people in MBA level finance and accounting courses. Here is the explanation that seems to work the best.
There are only two types of financial statements that you really need to know: a balance sheet and an income statement.
BALANCE SHEET
- Shows what you own (assets) and what you owe (liabilities)
- The difference between these two (assets - liabilities) is your net worth.
- Shows one particular MOMENT in time, a “snapshot” if you will.
Click the thumbnail to the right to see an example. As you can see, the money in your bank account, the market value of any property you own, your car (if you own it outright), and stocks are all examples of assets. Mortgages, car payments, credit card debt, and other loans are all liabilities. The difference is your net worth. Notice how it says a specific day in January and not just “January 2008″ because a balance sheet refers to one moment in time, not a period of time like a month.
February and March haven’t been filled out yet, but if you spent a few minutes once a month putting in those numbers you can see how easy it would be to track your progress month to month.
INCOME STATEMENT
- Shows where money is coming in (income) and where money is going out (expenses)
- The difference between these two (income - expenses) is your net income.
- Shows what happened over a PERIOD of time, instead of how things are at one moment like a balance sheet.
Again, click the thumbnail to the right to see an example income statement. For most people the primary source of income is their job so you might have that first. After that you can see the income from those two properties listed on the balance sheet, as well as income from a small business you started, just as an example. Secondly, you see expenses broken down by category and net income at the end. I’ll show you how to quickly categorize your expenses in a minute.
Notice how in the second month your cash flow is negative and the number appears red. Negative cash flow is bad! It means you are spending more than you’re earning, and that is the way toward bankruptcy, not financial freedom. If you hadn’t made your financial statement that month would you have ever know this? Probably not.
Thats it. Not as scary as you thought right? On corporate financial statements you will sometimes see some strange terminology, but the basic concept is the same as for this personal financial statement. Balance sheet: what you own, what you owe. Income statement: what you made, what you spent.
Why Quicken and Microsoft Money Suck
Let me take a minute here and rant about how bad these two pieces of software are (in case you don’t know, they are the two most popular “personal finance” programs out there). I think part of the reason so many people are afraid of getting their financial statements together is that at some point in time they booted up one of these two programs, spent several hours or days fiddling with things, and eventually got so frustrated that they never took another look at it. At the very least the “pain” of using these programs causes people to subconsciously avoid doing their financial statements each month, and they rarely get done.
To me this is such a shame. I could literally write an entire book on each one of these programs listing all the flaws in their design. They should be used as case studies in every user interface design class in the country on how NOT to design software. People tend to make excuses for them, saying that finance is complicated, or blaming themselves. Nope, its just embarrassingly poor software design, end of story.
Is it any coincidence that an entire industry has been born of “Quicken Certified Professionals” who are basically consultants that went through enough classes to learn to use the program?
I mean, imagine if Google had designed a personal finance program. The first time I used GMail I didn’t have to attend a class or hire a certified consultant to figure out how to use it. It just worked.
No Need For Reconciliation
So ANYWAY (rant over)…how do we get around it? Well, Quicken and MS Money are centered around this idea of reconciliation, which basically means you list all the things you spent money on and earned money from and then try to match each one to a line in your bank statement. To me this is incredibly tedious, and you always find yourself in a situation where you are saying “ok I know that line on my bank statement is valid, but I don’t know how to account for it in this damn program, so its saying all my numbers are wrong”. Then you give up.
To me, reconciliation is the worst part of the whole process, and the whole point of it is to make sure that no mistakes have been made (either by the bank, or on your part). Well, I have a much easier solution to that problem: JUST SCAN YOUR BANK STATEMENT AND SEE IF ANYTHING LOOKS OUT OF PLACE.
I can do that in about 30 seconds. Sure its not as robust, and it would never work in a huge publicly traded company, but for me it works just great. I don’t need to enter my $6.50 burrito and then match it to a line on my bank statement. I know its supposed to be there so I just move on.
After all, I’m not really that concerned about the bank making mistakes or people illegally charging my card. It rarely happens, and when it does its really easy to call and tell them it was a mistake and boom the money is back in your account. They are really good about that these days. So why spend 90% of your time (on reconciliation) worrying about a rare problem that is easily fixable?
I’m far more concerned about these questions:
- Did I make enough income to cover my expenses this month?
- Am I continuing to grow my passive income (like from real estate), instead of relying on earned income (from a job)?
- What am I spending money on and should I try to reduce/increase any of those areas?
- Is my net worth increasing?
- Am I taking on good debt (such as loans to buy houses that pay me each month) as opposed to bad debt (car payment, boats, vacation homes, etc which cost me money each month)?
Instead of using Quicken or MS Money, we going to use a program you probably already own to answer these questions: good old Excel.
How To Use Excel To Create Your Financial Statements
I’ve created a video below to show you how to create your financial statements in just a few minutes.
Here are the basic steps:
Note that for many of these steps I say “log on to such and such website” to get a statement. You can use paper statements that you get in the mail to do this, but I like to use online banking because the information is more up to date and you are guaranteed to have it all in one place instead of waiting for statements to arrive. But do it however is most convenient to you.
BALANCE SHEET
- Open your balance sheet template in Excel and log on to your bank website
- Take the account totals for each of your bank accounts and put them in the template
- If you own any real estate, log in to your mortgage website and see what your principal is at now. It should go down a little bit each month, reducing your liability.
- (Only need to do this step every 3 months or so, otherwise just copy the figure from the previous month over.) Ask your real estate agent to get the current market value of any real estate you own. This will update in the asset column. It is an estimate, you won’t know for sure until you go to sell it, which is why we don’t update it every month.
- Log in to your brokerage account if you own any stocks or bonds. Update the current value of your stocks in the asset column.
- Check the outstanding balances on any credit cards, student loans, car loans, etc that you still owe money on and update them in the liability column. Hopefully these should go down each month.
Moving on to the INCOME STATEMENT
- Open up your Income Sheet template in excel and log back in to your bank’s website.
- Down the transactions for the previous month as a CSV file (this will open in a separate Excel file)
- (See video for further details.) Categorize each item on the bank statement and find the totals using Data->filter->autofilter and AutoSum.
- Input each category of expense and income to your income statement.
Download The Excel Templates
By the way I did not make these excel templates. I have modified them, but the original templates came from the excellent Consumerism Commentary blog. They deserve all the credit.
>>>Download the Excel Balance Sheet Template<<<
>>>Download the Excel Income Statement Template<<<
Conclusion
Remember that financial statements are not scary, they are easy.
A balance sheet is just a list of what you own and what you owe at a particular moment in time. Subtract one from the other and you see your net worth. Make it grow!
An income statement is nothing more than a list of what money you earned and what money you spent over a period of time. Subtract one from the other and you see your net income. Make it grow!
And of course, as a bigger picture goal, you should be trying to get more and more assets that GENERATE INCOME (like real estate) and start businesses so that you eventually won’t have to have a job to cover your expenses each month. In other words, you should be “breaking free”.
I hope you’ve seen the importance of financial statements now. Only whats measured gets done, and if you aren’t measuring your financial health each month, then the chances of you blindly stumbling upon wealth one day are not high.
Best of luck, and if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comment box below.
Thank you,
Brian Armstrong
Want to get 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth for FREE? Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth are yours for free when you subscribe to get updates from StartBreakingFree.com!
John Josef said,
Wrote on February 6, 2008 @ 4:02 pm
Very nice. I’ve been meaning to do something like this. Another thought is instead of reconciling, if you are struggling, is to set limits before hand at the beginning of each paycheck or month or whatever. I try to do something like that but my spending has been so sporadic I haven’t been able to keep a solid income state and therefore very difficult to set limits on how much or how little i can spend on certain things a month.
[Reply]
bdurfee said,
Wrote on February 6, 2008 @ 8:01 pm
I’ve been looking for a non-threatening example of these for awhile. Thanks Brian.
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,
Wrote on February 7, 2008 @ 12:40 am
Glad to be of help, let me know if you get stuck. Setting spending limits is a good idea John Josef, I have always had trouble enforcing them though. You don’t get any notification when you reach the limit. Maybe there is a way to do this?
Also, I forgot to mention in the article that there are some free web based services coming up trying to replace Quicken and MS Money, such as Mint.com
I haven’t found one yet that I really like…Mint.com is closer to what would be ideal, but its not quite there yet. It seems to be designed around the idea of “where does my money go”, which in my mind is important, but not as important as Net Income (am I spending less than I earn) and Net Worth (am I building wealth).
[Reply]
Tomaz said,
Wrote on February 7, 2008 @ 9:22 am
A great way to simplify accounting, Brian.
It’s my first time here but it’s not going to be the last.
You like numbers, don’t you? ;)
[Reply]
Lucky said,
Wrote on February 7, 2008 @ 5:54 pm
Thanks Brian, great article. I wrote something similar at the end of December but you did a better job. http://www.helpyourselfgetlucky.com/2007/12/31/your-financial-life-at-a-glance
keep it up.
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,
Wrote on February 7, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
Thank you for the kind words.
Something else I was thinking about today:
For anyone who has read Robert Kiyosaki’s books, you know that he uses a different definition of asset and liability.
Kiyosaki says that anything which puts money in your pocket is an asset, and anything that takes money out is a liability.
By his definition, the home you live in, your car, your 401k, etc are all liabilities because you make payments on them each month and it pays you nothing back.
The point he is making is valid (that you should buy *income generating* assets, not assets which only cost you money) but his definition is not correct (in terms of accounting, financial statements, or the English language in general).
When he says asset he really means “income generating asset”. Trying to change the definition of the word to make an otherwise very valid point always seemed confusing and unnecessary to me.
Put all the assets under the asset column where they belong. You will see which are generating income and which are an expense each month on your income statement.
[Reply]
John Josef said,
Wrote on February 7, 2008 @ 8:34 pm
As a software developer, an idea situation would be linking up one of those apps with your actual bank statements (since most are online now) and having the ability to categorize each charge/gain on the fly.
This will probably happen in the future and will enable the IRS to keep better tabs on us too :-p
[Reply]
Terra Andersen said,
Wrote on February 11, 2008 @ 6:29 pm
It’s amazing how many people own businesses, but can’t construct their own asset balance sheet. It’s amazing how lacking our public schools are at teaching children personal finance… which really is THE most important thing they can learn. Without this, all of these years of education are essentially useless, if they end up in debt. Great post!
[Reply]
bdurfee said,
Wrote on February 11, 2008 @ 7:50 pm
“It’s amazing how lacking our public schools are at teaching children personal finance…”
I couldn’t agree more with this statement. How are they supposed to learn? From their parents - who also never received the basics?
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,
Wrote on February 13, 2008 @ 7:53 pm
Its true. I was thinking about that the other day how all of the most important things I ever learned were not in school. Thinking back on college, I am using very little of the knowledge I picked up there.
Maybe I will make a post on that, the most important life skills that aren’t taught in school.
[Reply]
46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money said,
Wrote on May 16, 2008 @ 2:53 pm
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swedegeek said,
Wrote on August 19, 2008 @ 1:40 am
And done. I didn’t quite put these together in 5 minutes, but I’m pretty anal with my personal financial spreadsheets, so I tweaked them a little. But I now have them assembled and I’m ready to rock from here. Good news is I have positive net worth and _should_ have a positive income statement for this month. Yay me!
I also had to track down all the info to login to my various accounts in order to see the most up-to-date info. That alone was a good exercise to check off the list. Thanks for providing these templates, even if you stole them! :)
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong reply on August 19th, 2008 1:48 am:
Congrats! Next month will be faster. I actually look forward to doin it on the 1st now ;)
[Reply]
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Dianna Robinson said,
Wrote on September 12, 2008 @ 9:06 pm
Hi Brian
I was looking through the web for a college accounting question and I found your presentation on how to do a Income and a Balance statement and I was impressed. It hasn’t come to me quite yet but I am closer than I was. My instructor is a good one but I still need some crtiquing to totally understand something that is probably so simple.Thanks for the download. It will come in handy.
[Reply]
Ross Mitton said,
Wrote on October 18, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
Consider me inspired. Finances have been the bane of my existence. Of everything I’ve tried, this has the most hope. 15 minutes a week entering changes, 10 minutes a month reviewing. This is my pledge, I’ll let you know in 2 months how I’m going.
Thanks Brian, Ross Mitton
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong reply on October 19th, 2008 1:12 pm:
Thanks Ross, let us know how it goes!
I know what you mean, sometimes I put it off too…but when it’s this quick to do it I have less of an excuse and it always gets my head in the right place to look at it and remind me of my goals. Thanks!
Brian
[Reply]
Janet Ann said,
Wrote on October 21, 2008 @ 5:41 pm
When I was getting my PhT degree (Putting hubby Through), I worked in a bank for several years and learned the futility of wasting time balancing a personal bank statement every month. Some customers went berzerkers if they couldn’t reconcile right down to the penny every month, but watching them taught me to look at the bigger picture. Most bank error I saw was as you say, infrequent, and usually in recognizably large amounts.
I hope you don’t mind that I shared your link with the readers of my blog :-)
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong reply on October 22nd, 2008 1:12 am:
Not at all Janet. Thanks and I think I’ll share that PhT degree thing with my sister, she is getting that one right now too!
[Reply]
Books yet to be Tasted « De-Buz-Blog said,
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caleb said,
Wrote on November 10, 2008 @ 6:10 pm
Finally, someone came out and said it. You don’t need MS Money or Quicken. I’ve tried both and all they do is distract you from managing your finances.
This is all you need:
* Mint–a beautiful site that can be powerful if you take advantage of its tagging ability
* Your bank’s online website
* Excel (for things the top two can’t do for you, like Real Estate).
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong reply on November 10th, 2008 11:54 pm:
Thanks Caleb. Do you like Mint? I tried it but for some reasons it didn’t give me the info I quite wanted. That was a while ago, so it may have changed.
[Reply]
caleb reply on November 11th, 2008 4:44 am:
Mint has undergone some major improvements all in the last month. It now includes student loans, mortgages, and stock summaries. I use it because it gives you a complete financial snapshot at any time across all your accounts, completely automated, along with trend analysis of your expenses with alerts to changes in your pattern of spending.
The best is the tagging option. Any expense item can be automatically “tagged” or “labeled” according to rules you set, the same way Gmail allows multiple labels on emails. So now if I want to see my HOA fees, I need merely click my “HOA” tag and I get the total. If I want all rental expenses, I click the “rental expenses” tag, which is also includes HOA expense items. These tags are applied to new items automatically according to your rules.
Mint is free and extremely user-friendly. It sends me an email every Friday showing how much I gained or lost in income, which now includes a stock summary (which I actually don’t like to see).
The only thing it lacks is a way to input the value of my real estate assets, even though it DOES account for my mortgage balances. The result is a very negative net-worth according to Mint. This is why I use excel; I simply add the total value of all properties to my Mint net worth to get my true net worth. This is the only measurement not fully automated.
I would highly recommend giving the free site a try to anyone who is sick of Money and Quicken. It really is refreshing. Hence the name, I guess.
[Reply]
Brian Armstrong reply on November 13th, 2008 2:57 am:
Yep I looked at it again for a bit. I realized the thing that bothered me about it: it is full of pretty graphs, but very little ‘actionable’ information. Nothing I can use to make an actual decision.
I guess what I’d want to see mostly is a true balance sheet, income statement, and trend over last few months.
They are so close to something REALLY good, so I can’t really fault them. I just get the feeling they approached it from the mindset of “what graph would display this information we have” instead of “what information are people really going to want to see”. It’s a common programming mistake and easy to fall into: showing what’s easy instead of what’s useful.
Simple example, saying “your computer has 356,235,265,234 bytes free” instead of “about 15GB”. But of course it goes way beyond that for an app like that.