As sad as it sounds, I do like a good personal finance spreadsheet. I like seeing what people track and how they do their formatting. So I thought it would be useful to share an example of my personal balance sheet in this post.
The principle of adding up your assets and liabilities is simple enough so I’m not going to teach you how to such eggs. But before I dive into my personal balance sheet example, I will touch on a couple of things I track and one thing I don’t:
- I track depreciation in my home and rental property, I break this down line by line in a separate spreadsheet. I mention this because most personal balance sheet examples don’t do this, so potentially this is a useful take away.
- I track my work notice period, pending salary and any bonuses. My work notice period is maybe a bit unusual, but the way I see it, this is a guaranteed pay that I can account for so it’s worth reporting.
- I don’t track the value of my home or rental property. I personally don’t find this useful. If prices are going up or down, so what? Unless I’m thinking of selling and leaving the country, then I don’t find the value useful.
Personal balance sheet example
Listed below is an example of my personal balance sheet. All my accounts that contain cash or highly liquid assets are under cash & cash equivalents. Any pending payments are listed under accounts receivable.
It’s obviously down to you how often you update your personal balance sheet. I personally, do it every 3 months or so. For me, much more than this feels like wasted effort.
Tracking depreciation
You’ll notice that I have depreciation listed under liabilities, while that’s normal for a business, I haven’t seen many examples of personal balance sheets tracking this. This is a gaping hole in my opinion. When you start adding things up, you quickly realise that you have a lot of outstanding liabilities.
The deprecation value in my spreadsheet links to a separate sheet where I break down all my depreciating assets. Here’s an example of what I track in my flat:
Based on the average lifespan for things like an oven, it’s easy to calculate how much to save each month. You may be surprised how much you should be saving, I have a rental property and the total amount in my “depreciation pot” is over £40K. I’m possibly being conservative with asset lifespans, however, I’d rather have too much saved than not enough.
A final note on depreciation: you’ll receive tax relief for replacement assets if you have a rental property. So your depreciation values can factor this in, for example, if you’re in the 20% income tax bracket and a washing costs £500, you’ll receive £100 tax relief. You can factor this in your depreciation spreadsheet so that you’re not saving up too much unnecessarily.
Google Sheets template
If you want to access my sample personal balance sheet as a Google Sheets template then click below:
Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions, feedback or tips on how you keep track of your personal finances.