Record your transactions

Contemporarily, and quite unfortunately, money is an oxygen-like necessity to live comfortably in this world. With money you can obtain a better life, better food, better protection against unforeseen circumstances for you and your inner circle, a better shelter, and preeminently, freedom. However, not everyone has the same capabilities to obtain such money, which is why the proper care, allocation, usage, and distribution of your personal finances is crucial for the peoplehood of you and your inner circle. I've created a template that I've been utilizing in the last couple of months to keep track of my expenses, earnings, and any other financial transaction that I might encounter. This template is based in Excel, which is easy to use, functional, and keeps all transactions neatly organized.

You can download it here: Antarctica

Allow me to explain the mechanisms of the template. The template consists of two sections:

• The recording of your transactions manually.
• The correlation of such transactions to your stockpile.

On the left-side first section, one has to input a total of six variables pertaining to each transaction: Month, Day, Year, Amount, Title, and Stockpile.

A stockpile is defined as a large accumulated stock of goods or materials, especially one held in reserve for use at a time of shortage or other emergency, however, in this case, it means your bank account, your savings, your bequest, your investments, or any other type of liquidity that can be easily access upon.

On the right side, you can find multiple attributes of your personal finances: Stockpile, Effluxes, Influxes, Monthly Yields, Monthly Reviews, and Debts. I've already explained what a Stockpile is.

An efflux is any transaction that decreases a stockpile, such transaction can be repeated on time bases (e.g. rent, gas, food, etc.), as long as it decreases your stockpile it is considered an efflux.

An influx is what you'd expect, the opposite of an efflux: any transaction that increases your stockpile (e.g. salary, side hustles, stipend, etc.) on a time basis, or even one-time transaction also counts.

Monthly yield is merely what you expect to receive as a byproduct of your monthly transactions based on the difference between your effluxes and your influxes, which it is intended to be positive always, otherwise you are in trouble and have to cut some of your expenses. This amount is what one strives for, what one aims to achieve at the end of each month.

Monthly reviews are a reality's slap on the face that summarize the actual monthly yield for each month of the year, as well as the total unnecessary chargers that took place in such month. The amounts in green and red represent the positive or negative yield of each month. The unnecessary charges are any charges that are not planned, any charge's amount not found in your Efflux column will be allocated here in order to emphasize the triviality and unnecessariness of such transaction.

Last but not least, depts, which blatantly and forcibly, are sometimes imposed on us without our consent. They are subtle and invisible chains that might not seem harmful, but they continuously take a part of your hard-wordking byproduct, which is quite fucking annoying. Pay them as soon as you can, I would make them a priority above all payments, the sooner you pay them, the sooner you free yourself from such leech.

The way the spreadsheet works is quite simple: adjust your own personal stockpiles, debts, influxes, effluxes, obtain the difference in the monthly yield, and let the transactions be recorded in the monthly reviews.

As you utilize this template, you will start learning patterns and spending habits about yourself, habits that you can refine, modify, remove, or improve in order to maximize and take proper care of your personal finances. Before you complain, yes, this spreadsheet requires you to manually input every single transaction that you take, even any cash transactions, all of them ought to be included. This is purposely implemented since every transaction has to be treated as crucial, not trivial, as it is the triviality we assign to a purchase the cause of negligence when it comes to personal finances. "Oh it's okay, I will buy this, it's not so much", "I will subscribe to this, it is 20 dollars anyway". Gradually, these trivial purchases stack up, which can cause distress in the future. Distress is ought to be avoided as it clouds our intuition, creativity, confidence, and preeminently, our learning capability.