My Family’s Money

I am the person who handles the finances in our family. I track our spending habits and make sure our accounts look like they are supposed to. I regularly head on over to the websites of our banking and credit institutions to check to see what purchases were recently made and enter them into our tracking spreadsheets (I used to do this using receipts but it ended up being more convenient to use the bank for this). These spreadsheets make prefect sense to me, but as I mentioned before they are still a work in progress and only look like a jumble of numbers to my wife. In fact, she considers them unreadable – and it is one of my new challenge-ified goals to make the information contained in these spreadsheets not only readable but also usable by my wife.

At the end of this month I am planning on taking the first step toward this goal. I will be putting together a presentation for my wife that will outline our financial situation. I have tried doing a similar thing before by just pulling my wife over to our computer and showing her the important information, but as I mentioned before these spreadsheets are unreadable to the outsider. I asked my wife the types of things that she would want to know about our finances and here is what she told me:

• how to get into our financial accounts
• where our money comes from
• where our money goes
• how we are progressing on our savings goals
• it has to look pretty (ummm, my spreadsheets don’t look pretty?)

All the suggestions are really good ones (especially the one about how to get into our accounts!) . So I am working on getting together a presentation that does all these things in a way that my spreadsheets simply can’t do – a pretty way. I’m not sure how effective I will be at accomplishing this, but it never hurts to try. I am putting together a Power Point like slide show so that I am forced to stray a from putting things in spreadsheets. Hopefully this will give me some insight into how to make my system more readable for my wife and this knowledge will translate into fulfilled challenge-ified goals.