My personal finance journey began when I was 13-14 years old. My parents (huge thanks to them) were not like other post-Soviet parents and didn’t consider money evil. They gave me a copy of Rich Dad Poor Dad, and later A Dog Called Money, and that’s when the game changed forever.
I saved the little money I could get to buy my first “asset” (with help from dad, of course) - a laptop that I could use to program (and play games). It was a ThinkPad that I am pretty sure is going to outlive my kids.
Here’s a picture of me using said laptop to root some Nexus phones.
Years went on, and I saved the salary I got from my first retail job to get a programming course and got my first job as a software engineer. Here is where you might think that I made a lot of money after that. You would be wrong. I was 19 years old, and my starting salary was a whopping $200 per month. To be fair, it grew relatively quickly to a respectable $1000 in 3 years. (Context: I was living in Armenia at the time, where the median salary would be around $500/month)
That’s when things got serious. You see, over that period, I lived with my parents, and between working and studying full time, my expenses included lunch and the occasional date. So there was no personal finance to manage. In my culture, you don’t move out - you get married and move out.
So I got married and moved out, and our expenses skyrocketed. Between the wedding, paying for rent and utilities, and setting up the apartment, we ran out of savings and ended up putting some expenses on a credit card. You can guess what happens next - we couldn’t pay it off the next month, and I could feel the disappointment of the Money dog.
At that point, I knew that something needed to be done, or we would be digging a financial hole for ourselves. We sit down with the wife and say, “We don’t even know what we are spending all the money on, let’s budget.”
The first few months of tracking our expenses were insightful, to say the least. I am pretty sure we cut 30-40% of spending just by not cutting things we didn’t care about, and everything seemed right again. We continued tracking every single dollar for 6 more years.
While this seemed like a good approach and helped us avoid debt, there were a few major problems:
- We became stressed about spending money even on the smallest things, even when we could clearly afford it
- It was taking too much effort, and we were making mistakes/forgetting to track
- Once we started saving some actual money, we had no Idea how much we had available to invest, and how/where to invest it
Once we started saving a significant amount, we needed a system to understand how much we can put into an investment account each month, and that’s when a new spreadsheet was born. It was chaotic at first, but after some iterations, I realized that it has the same value as all that budgeting and more, and requires far less input.
We started investing almost over 2 years ago and this system has served us well through, job loss, moving to a different country, and having a kid.
I decided to make it usable for other people and share it here.
Here you go - Net worth tracker