Where Does My Money Go, a Personal Finance App
The purpose of this app is to help you improve your financial position. This will improve your ability to take advantage of the opportunities life presents you with.
Having money definitely doesn't buy you happiness, but it does remove a lot of things that cause unhappiness.
Once you are able to see how your income, expenses and lifestyle are tied together, you will be able to make better financial decisions for you.
This app does that by creating a cash flow table from your bank transactions, categorised your way, so you can quickly and easily determine if you are spending your money wisely.
Why Use a Cash Flow Table for Income and Expense Tracking
It is quicker and easier to obtain the important information by looking at a cash flow table rather than a long list of transactions (eg your bank statement). This means you can spend more time thinking about the financial impacts of your decisions.
Look at the cash flow table below and see how quickly you can answer the questions listed.
The line marked Subscriptions, darker colour and left justified, contains the totals per month of all the lines underneath which are lighter in colour and right justified. The columns of the table are for the different months.
- How much did I spend on subscription services last year?
- Did I reduce the amount I spend on subscription services over the year?
- When did Docplay stop charging me?
- Did I only start Stan after cancelling Binge and Kayo?
The line marked Subscriptions contains the totals per month, and the last column on the right hand side is the total of the columns in the line. Answer $2,504.11.
The line marked Subscriptions contains the totals per month, and these are reducing.
The line marked Docplay shows last payment went out in December.
If you look at the lines marked Binge & Kayo and Stan you can see that yes I did.
Personal Finance Money Management
Now that you can clearly see where all your money comes and goes, because you have it clearly split out in a cash flow table, it's time to carefully consider if you are using your money wisely.
A good way to think about those decisions is use the following formula.
income = cost of living + fun money + rainy day savings + long term investments
- Income: After tax and after the costs of turning up to work. These costs include things like a suit, smart shoes, travel costs, childcare costs, tools. Every cost that is incurred as a direct result of you having a job.
- Cost of Living: This is the actual amount of money you require to live your life. Your cost of living needs to be less than you earn, otherwise you will be eating into your rainy day savings and then your long term investments. It also includes all loan repayments, and the reason for that is to encourage you to save for things rather than take out a loan to cover it.
- Fun Money: Life is for living, you have to have fun.
- Rainy Day Savings: Cash to tide you over and to help with the bigger purchases.
- Long Term Investments: What will you live on when you retire, or do you trust the government will help you?.
Obviously you want to increase your income and reduce your cost of living. It's easy to get all happy at the prospect of earning more money, but if you look at the formula you can see that earning an extra dollar will have exactly the same effect on your life as saving a dollar.
The reason you want to have your loan repayments as part of your cost of living is to encourage you to save for things rather than take out a loan to cover it.
As your income and expenses are clear, you can think carefully about how you can reduce your expenses without reducing your enjoyment of life, and if you think about it long enough you can determine which lifestyle changes you can make to improve your life and your finances.
Your First Time
The first time you use this app, it's very likely you will be horrified at how much you spend on stuff you no longer use, and how many "less than amazing" decisions you have made.
This is also the point of this app. Stop paying for things you no longer use, and acknowledge all of those "less than amazing" decisions as learning opportunities.
Learning how to manage your money is a process and you need to allocate time to it. Doing a little each month is better than a lot once a year. This app will provide you the resources you need to become really good at it.
Try it Yourself with our Sample Data
If you want to see how easy it is to create the cash flow table above from sample transactions using this app, then follow the steps below.
This personal finance app is designed to be used by anyone in any country, you can set your country as part of the sign up process.
- login to the app or create a new user This opens in a new browser window so you can refer to these instructions while you do the demonstration.
- Select "Transactions" in the top menu and then click on "Get Transactions".
- Click the button "Download Sample Transactions" under Option 3 to download 213 sample transactions to your computer.
- Select "Transactions" in the top menu and then click on "Load Transactions".
- Then drag and drop the sample transactions file to upload it to your secure area within the app.
- Select "Rules" in the top menu and then click on "Create Rules".
- Click on Add Default Rules. You can also create rules if you wish.
- Select "Analysis" in the top menu and then click on "Cash Flow Table" to take you to the interactive cash flow table.
