Manage Your Money With Excel

Ready to get a better handle on your finances? You don’t need a complicated budgeting system to get started. Thanks to a wealth of free financial templates from Microsoft, all you need is Excel for Mac and a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Here are five of our favorite templates for making sense of your money. You can download these from Microsoft’s website, but the easiest way to get them is right within Excel: In the New From Template screen that appears when you launch the app, just type the template’s name into the Search All Templates field.

Whether you’re making a budget for the first time or need to update an older one, Microsoft’s Household Monthly Budget template is a great place to start. More than a simple table, it offers a sheet to add categorized expenses, another for projected and actual spending, and a helpful Overview tab with a bird’s-eye view of it all.

An especially useful feature is the attention-grabbing red text that appears when you spend more than you budgeted for the month.

Small-business owners will appreciate the Expense Trends Budget template. In addition to providing dedicated tabs for each month’s expenses, its prebuilt summary tab helps you visualize expenditures by month and category to quickly see when you’re spending the most—and on what.

The Payoff Student Loans or Invest? template helps you figure out if you’re better off investing your monthly budget surplus or using it to pay off your student loan faster. (Of course, you can use this template for other types of loans too.)

Just enter your current loan balance, interest rate, and monthly payment, along with the projections for your potential investment. The template crunches the numbers to show the return for each approach.

The Charitable Gifts and Donations Tracker is a nicely formatted spreadsheet with columns for recording when, what, and how much you’ve donated, and whether each item is potentially tax-deductible. Come April, you’ll be glad to have this in one tidy place.

Planning for retirement is a necessity that too few of us do early enough. The Retirement Financial Planner is a great way to get started with some back-of-the-napkin math. Provide it with your current age, salary, savings, and investment returns, your expected pension and other post-retirement income, and your desired retirement age and income. Excel will instantly generate a table of your income and savings for every year of retirement, along with a nifty graph showing the trajectory of that projection.

Your Microsoft 365 subscription gives you full access to all Microsoft 365 apps and features across any platform. To subscribe, just log in to any 365 app and upgrade.

Microsoft Excel

Spreadsheets and Data Analysis

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