Tuesday, April 04, 2006

An Uncommon Way to Wealth

I was pointed towards a new site this past weekend and I just started checking it out. It is called An Uncommon Way to Wealth. Along with some good articles, he has some really nice Excel spreadsheets on the site that you can download and use for free. These Excel spreadsheets will help you track various parts of your financial life.

Here is a list of the spreadsheets that he currently has available:
I am going to take a closer look at the Inventory Spreadsheet, as invesntorying the contents of my home have been on my list of things to do for a long time. I will also be checking out the Master Information Sheet, so that I can get all my financial info in one place. The last one that I am really interested in is the Car Maintenance Schedule Spreadsheet.

Check them out for yourself and let me know what you think.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I tried three of those spreadsheets and found them to be completely useless. You could make a better one by yourself in less than 5 minutes.

Just my opinion, others may find them useful.

4/05/2006 8:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Aw, gee,

I wish somebody would have told me that they were "useless" - I'd like to make them as useful as possible, and honest feedback would be great. What exactly did you not like about them?

4/05/2006 3:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sean,
I really apologize about that - I'm a jerk. I didn't read too closely and kinda just thought that these were made by some corporation out there..

I personally have a spreadsheet for my finances that has grown and grown over the past couple of years. It's talored to the way I like it, so I was definitely too harsh on yours.

The 3 I downloaded were the net-worth, inventory and car-maintenance ones. I'll provide some feedback later... I'm at work now, but figure I definitely owe you one.

Sorry again,
bjk

4/06/2006 11:17 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here are my constructive comments:

Car Maintenance Schedule:
I do a lot of my own work on my cars, and I guess this spreadsheet would be helpful. Personally, I would rather have a spreadsheet that kept a log of the maintenance I had performed. For example, a log of all of my past oil changes. Maybe a tab for both my car as well as my wifes.

Inventory Spreadsheet:
On second inspection, I like this one and will probably use it. I can't think of anything to improve it.

Net Worth Wealth Spreadsheet:
I'm a little spoiled on this one, because I have a spreadsheet that I really like that I've been working on for a couple of years. I think yours is a good basic one for beginners. I'm not sure how a user would keep track of their numbers from one year to the next... aside from having an entirely new duplicate spreadsheet. It would be nice if the graph that you have would graph a separate line for the assets, liabilities AND Net Worth (forgive me if it does, I didn't enter too much data).

One of the things I like about mine is that I break out the separate assets into groups (and this may not be something you want to do), but for example, I would have a 'Stocks' item on the Assets page, and under it list a few stocks that I own. Then, I tally up my 'Stocks' total. I have separate sections for '401k', 'Roth IRA's', 'Stocks', 'Cash', etc. For example:
Stocks $22,200.00
IBM $10,000.00
DELL $5,000.00
WMT $7,200.00

One last general comment for all of the spreadsheets. I'm sure you have your reasons for it, but it would be helpful if they were editable. That way if the user wanted to taylor what you have and make small changes to the layout, etc.. they could. (Also, on the general "Bonus" message that accompanies each spreadsheet - the second paragraph kinda just ends in the middle of a sentence.)

Again, sorry for the harsh comments right off the bat.

4/09/2006 6:44 PM  

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