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Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

bou.ke

51–60 of 123 posts

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#52

I have an MSC in quant finance, and i'm seriously considering learning Django (in top of my backend skills) to build an complete app for personal finance management. Key features ; - Budget (aka cashflow management, what am I doing with my paycheck next month?) - Project planning (aka balance sheet, what is the purpose of my inflows and outflows over time?) - End of year results(aka do my projected budget match my pr…

Send me an email if you're looking for work :)

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#54

I have an MSC in quant finance, and i'm seriously considering learning Django (in top of my backend skills) to build an complete app for personal finance management. Key features ; - Budget (aka cashflow management, what am I doing with my paycheck next month?) - Project planning (aka balance sheet, what is the purpose of my inflows and outflows over time?) - End of year results(aka do my projected budget match my pr…

Why do you want to pay less taxes?

[deleted]

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to pay less taxes?

Its not that I want to completely avoid them. Its that tax laws of many countries are poorly written (or applied) and not doing optimization is financial suicide. Consider tax sheltered accounts (TFSA-RRSP in Canada, 401k in the US). Many people do not understand how they work or even what they are ; a lot of stranger tell me they ''purchased RRSP at their bank last month''. Also consider the case of freelance consul…

I'm generally pro tax if that's a thing, but it is worth noting that many countries use tax policy to shape incentives. If everyone ignored that incentive structure and just paid the tax, then there'd be more cigarette smokers and less EV drivers.

So you could in many ways reframe "avoiding taxes" as "doing what the government tells you to do".

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#56

High inflation question: Given 40% inflation. An item is offered for $1200 in 12 "zero interest" payments of $100 or $800 in cash. How do you compare their real cost taking into account inflation?

If (annual) inflation is 40%, then the annual discount factor is 1.40 and the monthly one is c = 1.40^(1/12) ≈ 1.0284.

Assuming the $100 payments are paid at the end of each month, the value of the money sent over in today's dollars is $((100/c^1) + (100/c^2) + (100/c^3) + ... + (100/c^12)) which is a geometric series with ratio 1/c, so the sum is (100/c^1 - 100/c^(12+1))/(1-1/c) ≈ $1005.

So take the cash offer.

For spreadsheet calculations, look into the SERIESSUM flavor of macros.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#57
Very cool! I really appreciate this list. I'm currently evaluating what spreadsheet functions to add to my spreadsheet product [1], and I'm gonna add these to the roadmap.

We currently support the functions listed here [2] - and allow you to write spreadsheet formulas that get transpiled directly to Python code!

If y'all have any other reccomendations for functions we should add - let me know!

[1] https://trymito.io/hn [2] https://docs.trymito.io/how-to/interacting-with-your-data/mi...

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#59
> An controversial book on investing I recently read is Lifecycle Investing which argues that young people are often much too conservative in their investment strategy, because they should model their future earnings as a bond and allocate enough to equities to compensate for holding this bond, even leveraging up to 100% to get the right allocation.

That’s a pretty interesting idea. I wouldn’t take the future earnings = bond concept literally, especially if you’re in a high volatility profession, but it seems useful as a mental check when assessing asset allocations.

Re: Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance

#60

Love these formulas and wish this information was more understood and accessible to people when making decisions. I've personally benefited a lot from a mortgage payoff spreadsheet I have. It's so easy to duplicate a tab, change the interest rate or additional payments and see what the long term impact is. That being said, and a disclaimer that I created this, I have been charting my path to being able to retire earl…

Have you looked at the "What-if Analysis" functionality in Excel? Scenario Manager and Data Table is designed for that kind of use case (one set of formulas, multiple sets of inputs/scenarios.)

Here are some videos on how to use them.

Data Table https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7S9ecg1wdQ

Scenario Manager https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_eFIdsV1Bk

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