Have you ever wished for New Year’s to be the day after Christmas? This year, I wish it were true. I do not want to wait a week to get my life back in order. Which is why I published my first post before the first of the year. I simply did not want to wait. Plus, today is payday and I want to start putting my new plan into action.

It's hard to be at work today. There’s a lot of stuff I want to do at home to get ready for the new year. Clean, organize, start posting stuff to sell. I have a lot of knit and crochet things I want to list on Etsy.

I like starting off the new year with a clean house. I took New Year’s Eve off work so I could clean my house from top to bottom. I plan on re-organizing things and make better use of the space I have. I will probably also be cleaning this weekend. Not because my house is so big I can’t clean it in one day, but because I want to start going through cupboards and getting rid of things I don’t need or use.

But this is a blog about saving money, right? Well, organizing and saving money go hand in hand. How else do I find the things to sell on Facebook groups? By cleaning and organizing.

One of the things I had to organize is my finances. I needed a better way to keep track of my spending and my bills. So I designed an easy to use spreadsheet. Okay, it is easy for me to use because it works with how my brain works. And, I think if I have a good instruction guide, other people will be able to use my spreadsheet, too. Each month has its own page. On the left hand side, I have a running total for income, expenses and what I have in my account after everything is accounted for. I also have running totals for my Savings account, HSA account and my grocery account. Yes, I have a separate grocery account that automatically gets money in it every paycheck.

The next section is my income. Everything I make from my VA disability check to the money I make selling things to my paycheck from the day job.

The last section has 2 parts.  I have a running list of all the bills I have paid so far this month and I have a list of bills that are due this month. The second list helps me budget what I can afford to pay.

I also have separate pages which track my income for the year, what I’ve paid in bills for the year, and my loan count down. I also have pages showing what I have paid out of my HSA and grocery accounts.

In making my spreadsheet, I’ve learned so much about Excel and what it can do. I love it! I love the feeling I have knowing all my financial data is at the tip of my fingers, so to speak. And every year, I spend a weekend prepping my spreadsheets for the next year. Not only my bill spreadsheet, but also my inventory spreadsheet and my business income/expense spreadsheet.

I had fun last night tweaking my spreadsheet. I created new sheets in the spreadsheet to track my HSA account, grocery account and savings account, and created new formulas on the main pages to track those totals. I felt so smart - I created 2 new formulas based on what I've already learned about filtering data. 

I'll be back later today with my paycheck and a breakdown of everything I have paid!