My question is how do we calculate income after tax, is it after 401k and HSA witdrawals or before? Dividends? Increase your income and/or lower your expenses to decrease your “Years to FI” number and walk away from your job even sooner! 1. My years to FI would probably reduce as I won’t need as much income in retirement! It appears some numbers may not have transcribed correctly from the averages sheet to the F1 sheet. Thanks. a) Include the rental mortgage in the mortgage expense line Spreadsheet123® is largest provider of Spreadsheet Templates for Microsoft® Excel®, OpenOffice.org, and Google Docs. This is golden. Hi, are therr any products available in the UK that you’d recommend? For example, if I’m contributing $100 a month to a Roth and $500 to a 401k, should there be a line item for each of these as a “spending expense”? I have tried to contact them but they didn’t respond to my question because I used an email address that is not linked to an account. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, Alberto. It is particularly important to the wholesale and retail, hospitality, and public administration and health sectors, which employ around 1.5 million non-UK nationals. – Same thing. Thanks! I pretty much read 90% of each website before going on to the next and I’m almost done reading all your posts as well. I’ve been using it for the last few months and updated it to as far back as I have history, and its working great. If you run into any issues with formulas or if you don’t have any software to open the .xls file, just upload the file to Google Sheets and use it there. i just redirected to the home page of the website, thanks. It appears some numbers may not have transcribed correctly from the averages sheet to the F1 sheet. Assuming around 2% average inflation over the same time, I’m considering an update to my model to use 6% instead. This leaves out any contributions to HSA, 401k, or other pre-tax retirement vehicles. “Tax-Free (Withdrawable)” is the cash amount on an account that you can withdraw without penalties. Hi! Where would 529 accounts fall under? The spreadsheet has been an eye opener. For the “Averages” tab I can think of 2 ways: 1) a) Do not include the mortgage payment in expenses section My husband & I have a similar spreadsheet (Not as detailed and awesome thou). I guess you cannot make liquid your home an consider as a part of the withdraw rate or am I wrong?, thank you very much,. Wanted to thanks the Mad Fientist for putting out his spreadsheet for us all to use. thanks so much! The second alternative requires, I think, a lot more money saved up at any likely rate of return. i was so frustrated. and keep up the awesome work. I had a few things that I’d like to tweak to make work for my situation, the main ones were: 2. As for student loans, you will need to add a new section to the balances tab called “Student Loans” with as many rows as necessary to capture all of your accounts (enter the data as negative numbers!!! I do have a quick comment and two questions though. Column width can also be changed using a double click on the top right side of the column or dragging the column to increase the width. 2) I don’t own a home, but save $1500/month towards future purchase of a house. Just FYI: the Personal Capital links do not work for me (accessing from Europe). My wife and I have been on FIRE for 3 1/2 months. The FI tab is great for motivating you to lower your expenses because when you see that it will take an extra 1.2 years of work to permanently fund your expensive cable TV package, for example, you’ll probably be more likely to decrease that expense or eliminate it completely. A household budget, ideal for planning monthly expenses in line with projected income. Or should I take my After-Tax pay and add back any automatic savings (401k, IRA)? When this column is consistently over 100%, you’re financially independent! The third year we will not draw down and we will enter ‘surplus-savings-mode’. Anyone with a couple of rental properties use this spreadsheet? We have also began development of free Calendars and some Word Templates such as Business Cards, Gift Certificates and Address Labels. For example, I think it assumes that if you leave your job and no longer collect a salary, your costs will continue to be the same. I was wondering about the “averages” tab specifically, and how you incorporate 401k and traditional IRA contributions. I am listening to all your past and current interviews and I will be up to date soon. MF – This is wonderful. c) Enter the entire rent amount (that the tenant pays) in the “Supplemental Income” row. It should be all the money you received (even if the money was invested directly) minus the taxes you paid. Hey Drew, did you ever manage to figure this out? This is accounted for in the ‘Net Worth’ tab, but the ‘FI’ tab is missing these contributions. Once this value is consistently lower than your, After-Tax Savings Rate – This row computes your after-tax savings rate. It would be pretty helpful if you walked through this document and showed your process of filling it out, pulling from mint ect. Thanks. Send Email We will normally respond to your enquiry within 48 hours of receipt. I’m also getting a $0 value for ‘Starting Balance’ in cell C2 of the FI tab. I use YNAB as my budgeting software and I’ve had a hard time determining which categories to use. So for example when I increase the growth rate, it goes down to “-0.58”. The Investments tab computes the totals of each type of investment account (e.g. Here, your monthly expenses are annualized and your “Time to FI” number is calculated based on those expenses. If you are using the 4% rule, you need 25 times your annual expenses invested, plus the cash to pay off the debt in a lump sum. We have looked at SS optimization and believe it would be best to start SS at 67, for each of us. The Enhanced Pension Provision spreadsheet to allow colleges to account for future costs of early retirement or redundancies in their 31st July 2016 financial statements. How do you address long term savings for: We are ready to retire and are attempting to determine the optimal funding sequence for retirement. So anyway I’m sadly a bit of a beginner on Excel, for all of this daily, monthly, and yearly tracking simply just copy and paste creating new columns and tabs correct? I’m at a loss. I just realized that I must have added the “Home Equity” row to the Net Worth tab some time back. Or, you could compare your total housing expenses to how much it could cost to travel and stay in Airbnbs full time and it may make more sense (and be more fun) to become a nomad instead. Again, if you instead add the “Student Loans” category somewhere in the middle (not at the top or bottom) then the formula for the Total will automatically include the new values. With all the different retirement savings rules and tax laws I can’t use your spreadsheet, so hoping you know someone in your network that you could put me on touch with. Mint allows an account balance export via the Trends page, but it is automatically sorted from highest balances to lowest. For example, you find you need $700,000 to generate the 4% withdrawal that will cover your expenses. This significantly changes the amount in that line based on all the benefits, HSA, 401k, ESPP etc. You’re a young guy – will your savings keep you above water, for say, another sixty years or so? 2) Treat it just like the primary residence. No, Jared is wrong, the spreadsheet does subtract your home equity from the starting balance. I know I could just change $ to £ but you might think other changes might make it more relevant to UK followers? From someone from down under in New Zealand reading your blog! So happy I found you, actually I found you on the podcast Radical Personal Finance. Is there any way to mail you personally if there are any doubts regarding financial independence? I’m not sure how to tap the net worth of ones home as part of the draw-down. Changing that might fix my issues! (Note: The sheet actually says I reached FI, so the number is showing negative – ie “-0.66”. Thank you so much for sharing, and thank you all folks for all your input. How do I make it so the formula automatically includes the new column? Yes, you should include your retirement account contributions in your After-Tax Salary amount. So grateful for your generosity. Unless his calculations are somehow considering that? I changed the Net Worth tab to show stock/bond allocation, as well as liquid/illiquid/property. Or does this take into account an increase in salary? Thanks for the clarification. Would those totals be placed on the investment tabs of the FI spreadsheet? Should I just leave the amounts off this worksheet altogether? Hi, I have a Macbook, and am using Google Sheets for the spreadsheet and don’t even see a Balances Tab. daycare, and uh.. ahem *car payment* I know, I know!) OP with regard to the portfolio (rather than the retirement planning bit), the way I have understood it is you want to retire in 6 years but you have; 50% = 1 active fund. For example: Home insurance you have as $0 on the averages sheet (with the line below it as property tax for $273), but on the F1 sheet you have Home insurance as $273. Ideal for monthly and yearly budget and expense tracking. If I change the withdrawal rate by a single %, it has a huge impact on my final FI figure, so I want to ensure I get it right and fully understand what it means etc. or if you take out ‘too much’ for an emergency? I did a search for problems with “Starting Balance” on the FI tab, and found nothing so I am creating a new comment. how do you determine FI, and when your investments tank? Copy and paste these into a new sheet in the FI workbook, convert the text to a number format, and link up formulas as necessary. How should we add those into the spreadsheet? Can you check the link, perhaps? I’m having trouble getting the spreadsheet to work (the numbers won’t enter and the menu is mostly greyed out). That will give you a valid number. Our income is distorted by yearly bonuses. Housing and bank accounts do not generate significant capital gains in normal circumstances. On the Averages tab my Necessary Coverage is always 0%. If you ever add the new row to the bottom or top of the credit cards list, then excel will not automatically extend the range of all the formulas that use those values. Do you mean, forever? If all of your assets are in After Retirement Age accounts, you can’t be FI until after the age of 59.5 without serious penalties and taxes, right? The spreadsheet does not assume a “Safe Withdrawal Rate” i.e. This tab also shows you how much you’re spending on all the major spending categories (e.g. (The row numbers may be different if you add/subtract categories from the Net Worth tab). Do you have any such tool for yourself or have you seen any good ones – preferably in flexible spreadsheet form vs. the online calculators? When it comes time to fill in the new month, copy and paste the locked formulas over to the new month’s column, then paste values over the old month (so the balances do not continue updating). I put all my numbers in and modified it a bit to work better for me and was shocked to see it says just a little over 5 years until FI! What should a brokerage account funded with after tax dollars be classified as? Thanks for this. Question please: Why is there no $$ allocation for cost of groceries, car insurance, gasoline & car on your final F1 sheet? Hello, We pay everything out of pocket with plans to use the HSA down the road. In earlier comments he suggests you add those contributions to the After-Tax salary, but this does seem a little off since 401k contributions are Pre-tax income, not Post-tax. The actual travel expenses on the Averages tab. I just wish Mint or Personal Capital had a public API so that I could write a program to do everything automatically :), https://github.com/haochi/personalcapital. obviously i rarely use excel. Spreadsheet123® is registered trademark of Spreadsheet123 Ltd. by Spreadsheet123 - The Ultimate Guide to The World of Excel. I see how that’s easy to do with insurance and transportation, but a bit trickier with FSA. Yes, you interpreted it correctly. 401k, IRA, college, after-tax brokerage, E-fund, big purchase, etc). Free Spreadsheet for Tracking Your Business Expenses. We will take a closer look at the spreadsheet. I’m still in the midst of listing everything I need to sell on eBay … man it’s a lot of stuff I’ve been hoarding. The Investments tab uses the values on the Net Worth tab to provide a picture of where your money is located and what you’re invested in. Thus, you cannot have a decrease in your net worth, or values of 0.00 for future months. Oh, wait I just realized my starting balance on the FI page is 0$. The problem is that the MATCH function requires that the values in the lookup array be in ascending order. 2. EPP 2016 calculator (with factors) (201609).xls EPP accounting assumptions 2016 for AoC.pdf. It determines the amount you need in your portfolio before you can be FI. Is that the reason?). So I’ll end up with a forecast average expenses made up of YTD actuals + budgetted amounts. While Personal Capital is pretty awesome, I’ve found no simple way to export the account balances (if there is one, please let me know!) 2. Thanks a lot for the spreadsheet, it saves me a lot of time from creating one. What about extra money being paid towards my mortgage? We did not retire super early (58 and 60), but we have been ‘away’ long enough to experience the First Day, First Week, First Fortnight, First Month and First Quarter as so nicely outlined in your article: do you just go back to working to ‘get back to FI’ ? I’m incredibly lucky to contribute to a defined benefit pension but am unsure how to account for it in terms of future planning. Similar issues here… the link doesn’t download the spreadsheet. This is one of my fears of early retirement is that i’m going to have to pay for a lot more things, insurance, dental, phone, food ect. A very exciting one. I’m not sure how this will all work out. I’m going to send him an email about it…. If you don’t have a Personal Capital account, you can sign up for free here. As far as the FSA is concerned, I would treat that as spending because you either use it or you lose it so you’re guaranteed to spend that money during the year, whether you actually spend it on something useful or not. Or since this is coming from savings we’ve accrued through prior years, should it already be accounted for? And if you want to easily chart out your progress to financial independence on a pretty graph, check out the FI Laboratory software I developed! Couple questions on keeping this thing properly updated. Personal Capital can do the same thing but since I started using Mint before Personal Capital came out, I’ve just continued using it for this purpose. Success! Thank you for your support! I’ve been planning for our (semi) retirement (more appropo term is “Financial Independence”) and I’ve (just) started something similar. Are the tax liabilities considered when calculating your years to FI? I got your spreadsheet – thank you very much for sharing – but unfortunately I cannot open a Personal Capital account because a US phone number is required and I live in Europe. Brian Any ideas on how to fix these issues? Apologies if this question is too simple – but can someone explain to me why home equity is counted as a part of the total that generates growth that we can draw money out of? I’ve decided to share my eBay selling template – it’s nothing spectacular, just something I whipped up in Microsoft Excel to help organize and automate selling a large number of items. is anyone having problems downloading? I am not able to download this file, download link doesnt work. In your case, when you spend the cash to buy the house, you’ll add the home value and mortgage to the spreadsheet, which will keep your net worth balance the same before and after you buy the house. In my previous reply, the last line should read – Increasing the withdrawal rate will *reduce* the amount you need in your portfolio before you can be FI. I’m assuming that would also require taking into account the person’s age. Erin, I’m stuck on this part too. I’ve just been manually copying everything from Personal Capital (haven’t looked to see if they have an export function) but your method looks like a good way to do it. I don’t really understand how I am supposed to calculate this – is this effectively [100 / (life expectancy – retirement or FI age)]? It showed up in our Cash accounts. I have a spreadsheet that I have been using to track my spending for several years now, but I am always looking to improve it. But, there’s a workaround…. Thank you for sharing!. On the rare months when I do have supplemental income my discretionary coverage numbers are very high like 2000%. It’s the best tool I’ve found for managing my portfolio so I definitely recommend it. Am I missing something here? While I know that it technically is, isn’t it an asset of a different nature? Otherwise you’re chasing your tail trying to get the accounts to lineup correctly. What am I missing? This is wonderful. So if your employer pays you $5000 every month and contributes $150 to your 401(k) and you pay $1000 in taxes, spend $2000, and the rest goes to your 401(k), IRA, taxable account, etc, you should put $4150 in the “After Tax Salary” field ($5000 + $150 – $1000) and that will account for those retirement account contributions. Since many of us will not have the same account structure as you have presented in the excel document I think it could be helpful to include an additional sheet that contains categories. How would you account for a final salary pension? So why is it included in the formula for calculating FI? It’s going to be a glorious weekend but I don’t think I’ll be able to keep myself away from the spreadsheeting. Finally (and most importantly), this tab computes how long it will take you to reach FI! Total Taxes Payment -$3500 This changes when I edit my House Value number…but I have to edit it to about $300k less than what the value is to see any actual Net Worth number appear. So you will need to add that for the above fix to work. Okay, on to my questions. Am I supposed to enter the total amount I contribute to my HSA & Roth each month? Obviously it’s not as simple as that since couples have the advantage of shared expenses/resources along with disadvantage of taxes for instance…. My total coverage is also usually 0% except on the months when I have supplemental income and then it might be 200%. I still use an old US number on some websites and that works as long as they don’t need to use it to communicate with me. Will they use the phone number to actually send a text message? Thanks! All I am doing is entering current account values (pre-tax) for my investments. I added tabs for each month for itemized expense tracking instead of using mint.com I also track income streams this way. Hi there and thanks for sharing your spreadsheet. Question on the FI tracker. 1. Did you ever get an answer to this? Some of those formulas you have on the FI sheet I would not have been able to come up with!! For example: Home insurance you have as $0 on the averages sheet (with the line below it as property tax for $273), but on the F1 sheet you have Home insurance as $273. Luckily I’ve been tracking our household expenses for the last 20 years on quicken! If I ever come up with something that I like, I’ll post it here. Traditional IRA or Roth and then brokerage account? It’s already helped hundreds of thousands of people. What is the link again to access the worksheets? So just make sure you don’t pull the formulas over on the net worth tab until you update all your averages for the month. Like some of us, I have a Budget workbook and a Retirement workbook because I want to tailor inputs, outputs and graphs to my needs and your workbook does a good job of bringing those together, something I’ve had on my “to do” list for over a year now. Shouldn’t this be pulling from my Net Worth sheet? Is that right, and are there any other assumptions? Our plan is to backfill the initial drawdown (to make our transition whole again over four years) and begin improving our sustainable budget significantly thereafter. No I haven’t figured out a work around for this yet. Here’s a link to an example of what I did that shows the text conversion and an account order check: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aNQdhFGJINwyqC58slPRkSXtmXkaO8b-4lLZKpKz8nk/edit?usp=sharing, Nice! IOOF Holdings Ltd. ABN 49 100 103 722 Level 6, 161, Collins Street Melbourne VIC 3000. I’m finally taking a mini-Mustachian leap and this spreadsheets is one of the tools I’m using. For Roth IRA you should enter the amount of contributions that you can withdraw later penalty-free. number then just needs to be doubled if you are a married couple? Obviously be sure to not double count money coming in. Hello The Mad Fientist, I’ve been playing around with this spreadsheet and I really like your take on this kind of tool. I’m not sure how this will all work out. I also added user input of current age so that age at FI could be calculated. I tried starting over and same result. This step is really important because you can’t determine if you’re financially independent without knowing how much you spend every year. I believe, but am not sure, if we could then convert all of the non-deductible IRA into a Roth- without any tax, whatsoever. Does it really matter for FI calculation? I am learning a great deal as I am on the path to becoming FI myself. Or only enter the exact amount we spend OOP for each month individually, like you suggested for the Roth IRA contributions? Yup, include that as well! I just copy the columns for the additional months and then create a brand new sheet for the next year (although, you could just continue using the same sheet if you wanted to). Thought you would be interested to also know about : http://www.goalgami.com/content/index.php if you are not aware of it. My wife and I are very close to FI! so where can you actually download this? My personal spreadsheet calculates it correctly so I must have just got a bit copy/paste happy when I was putting together this version or something. It's a massive bet on one style (quality) that goes in and out of favour potentially for years at a time. Do you know any way around this? Mad-Mad-Mad Fientist – Great looking calculator for FI and flexible for scenario planning! Thanks a lot for sharing. Thanks for all your good posts and podcasts! I fooled around with it and if I put a lower salary like 6000$ in the after-tax salary box it worked just fine, but once I went higher than 9,000$ it stopped working and instead of a number in the average after-tax salary box I get this: ########. I recently enrolled in a term life insurance policy. Duh! I’ve read through all the comments, but I don’t see my question answered there either. Would it be a valid step to link that to an accumulating line item in the Averages tab, earmarked for Medical expenses? Oh my! We don’t include the value of depreciating assets in our net worth calculation, so the value of the purchased car won’t contribute to our net worth. Our free Budget Planner puts you in control of your household spending and analyses your results to help you take control of your money. Do I need to have Excel? I do not include the balance in any other total, especially not net worth. Hi, your link to the spreadsheet does not seem to be working for me. New to the site and podcast…..enjoying it. Discretionary Coverage – This row shows what percentage of your discretionary expenses are covered by your supplemental income. So if you have a $6,000 property tax bill, and you pay it in two installments, it shows up as a $3,000 monthly payment.