Finance Check 2025

Back in the early 2000’s I used Quicken to manage and track my finances and I loved it. I was single and I didn’t have much to track. I should likely be doing that now, but I don’t. Instead, here’s what I do to track my finances and have been doing this for the past 7 years.

In a Google sheet, I track the balances of my deposit accounts, retirement accounts, my brokerage account, and my liabilities.

I have a checking, savings, and a couple of CDs. At the end of every month, I put the balance of those in the sheet, and it sums them up into a single column just called ‘Deposit Accounts’. I have two retirement accounts, so I enter the balance of each of those, and the sheet will sum those two cells into a single column just called ‘Retirement Accounts’. For brokerage - just one account. For liabilities, I have the house outstanding balance, and back when I still had car payments, would put the outstanding balance of those as well. The sheet would sum the outstanding balance into a single cell called liabilities.

So at the end of each month, I have a new row in my sheet for total deposit accounts, total retirement, total brokerage, and total liabilities. On another tab in that sheet, I have charts that show how those values change month per month. I’m grateful to say that my deposit accounts have grown, my brokerage account has grown, and my retirement accounts have really grown!

I’m also relieved to say that my liabilities chart goes down every month. I have no car payment. So my sole liability is the house - purchased a couple of years ago, where I bit the bullet on those new interest rates and high home prices.

I bought a house at the time when house prices shot up at the same time mortgage rates did. I also didn’t get much for the sale of my previous home. I now have a 30-year mortgage on home that costs more than I ever thought I’d pay for a house. If you do the math on when this site says I’m planning to retire, you can see that the term of my loan far exceeds my planned last day to work. I won’t have the income to continue making payments like I do today.

So that could mean that I’m forced to move from this house long before I ever finish paying it off. The alternative, and the one I’m trying to do, it to throw extra money at principal every month. I’m thrilled to say that as of right now, with the extra payments I’ve put in, I’ve knocked 5 years off my loan in the two-year time period I’ve owned the house. And if I’m able to continue my extra payments at the rate I’ve been doing them, I project I will have this house paid off by 2040. This assumes I manage to keep my current state of employment and prices don’t drive me poor in other ways.

I’m so incredibly lucky where I am right now, and I don’t take that for granted. I have a fairly lax budget process. We pay for things like groceries, clothing, etc all through credit cards, which I pay off every month. I max out my retirement contribution, and as long as the charts are going in the right direction, I don’t micromanage the household spending. This will work until it doesn’t, but for now, it works.