Built a personal finance template using Notion

Tracking personal finance using Notion

Chirag S P
Productivity

Finance tracking is essential if we need to track our expense and avoid lifestyle inflation. But there is only so much information our brain can hold.

My philosophy for financial discipline is simple,

  1. It should be easy to track
  2. It should factor in my emotional state
  3. I should see my goal every time I see my financial tracker.

To do this effectively I employ notion. Notion’s biggest advantages are,

  1. Its simple to use and gives almost all features of excel
  2. It has a good desktop site and a mobile app
  3. And is effectively free for an individual.

Below is the link for the financial tracker template I use. You can duplicate this template and personalize for your own convenience.

Notion Finance Template

In this template I’ve basically divided it into

  1. Savings and Expense for each month
  2. Debt amount each month
  3. Investments each month
  4. Deposits each month
  5. Expected expense for next month

Beginning of each month I set aside a fixed amount for each expense. I preferably set a flexi deposit or a short term deposit for each expense. This acts like a bucket from which I can take money from.

When it comes to ‘Debts’, you can do yourself a favour if you can clear your credit card debt due every month. Credit card interest rates are one of the highest i.e 36% to 40%. This gets compounded and if you just keep paying the interest, then it is a sure short way of making you poor.

But Credit card not all bad. When you get a good discount or a interest free EMI option, it is great choice, provided only if you pay your full due amount every month.

Next on the list is investments. A good investment is one which should compound more than the inflation rate every year without much risks (i.e more than 5%).

Safe bet for these are PPFs, Mutual Funds, RBI Bonds among others. If you some money left over after this then you invest in risky investments like Stocks, Gold , Crypto among others.

With Deposits, I set them for my different yearly goals, For example

  1. Emergency fund. This should at least 6X your monthly expense
  2. Travel Fund. I try to save enough for one big vacation per year and 4-5 small vacations per year.
  3. Investment Fund. This fund is to invest in stocks or anything else when a good opportunity arises.

And finally the Future expense page. This page is just to track any future expenses which I need to take care of.

Personal finance need not be hard and can be actually be fun. I hope this article is helpful in better understanding your personal finances.