I have always liked order. When I was five or six, somebody gave me a small, blue and white typewriter and I decided to turn my bedroom into an office. I set pens neatly in a pot; paper notebooks were placed at right angles to the desk under my cabin bed. I didn’t have any work to do, but the orderliness of the place set my mind at rest.
Sometimes, order can at first sight look like chaos. I didn’t have much call to use spreadsheets for the first 20 years of my career. Such things were for accountants, I thought; for ordinary people, they were just jumbles of figures.
If I reached back into the darkest depths of my memory, I could just about recall a few lessons in the computer room at school, when we were shown the rudiments of Microsoft’s Office applications. Excel, I remembered, was the green one.
Things changed when I took up a job which involved responsibility for a large-scale training project. Millions of pounds were coming into the charity I was working for, then going out; each penny had to be properly accounted for. When the head of finance sent me a swathe of spreadsheets for what he called Q1, I was frankly baffled. When I realised I was supposed to give them the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down, I began to sweat.
Then a funny thing happened. I fell in love with Excel.
It was a whirlwind romance, catalysed by our finance chief telling me that on one of his spreadsheets, there was a shortfall of 23 pence which he couldn’t reconcile. It didn’t matter, he said, given the minuscule sum involved – but I became determined to find it. I spent an hour trawling spreadsheet cells, checking sums, doubling back on the original inputs. At last, I located it. Our finance head was delighted, if possibly bemused at my obsessiveness. I declared my love for Excel to be forever.
Such was my adoration, seeing spreadsheets at work wasn’t enough. I wanted them at home too; with me in my personal space as well as my professional one. What wonderful order they could bring to the numbers in my life.
First stop was pensions. Over the years, I’d been enrolled in four different workplace pensions, but had only a vague idea of what was in them. A couple sent me an annual statement; others I could check online but rarely did. On an exciting day off, I made a point of checking the status of each one – and instead of noting down totals on a scrap of paper, I added them to an Excel sheet. The totals seemed underwhelming and spurred me to research what money I might actually need to save for my future retirement.
Next, I created a sheet covering various savings accounts I’d set up over the years – for myself or my children. Once again, pulling all the numbers into one place made me appreciate that I had not been fully on top of my finances. A savings account I’d set up more than a decade earlier turned out to be paying almost zero interest: the modest sum in it was becoming ever more modest as inflation bit. I switched it to a better provider.
Likewise, the accounts I’d set up for my children when they were born (a Child Trust Fund for the elder; a Junior ISA for the younger) were languishing. A glance at the spreadsheet showed that without me making an improved, regular contribution, the kids wouldn’t get the windfall I’d envisaged.
With the credit side sorted, I moved onto outgoings. Bank statements are all very well, but who actually reads them these days, now that they sit quietly in a corner of the mobile app rather than hitting the doormat every month, demanding attention? After an hour or two with a spreadsheet, I had set out average monthly costs of groceries, train travel, petrol, children’s clubs and the rest – as well as big one-off events like holidays.
Unavoidable costs (mortgage, electricity, food etc) were colour-coded red; those which could be dispensed with easily (eating out) were in green; and those which where somewhere in the middle were amber. Each had their own total, which I would adjust every quarter as costs waxed and waned. It was beautiful in its clarity.
Not that my family appreciated it. My son only wanted to know how much he had in his Junior ISA. My daughter shrugged. My wife – like that former finance colleague – thought me obsessive.
But what do they know? The simple truth is that properly organising and tracking my personal finances has saved me money. And it has forced me to rethink how I plan for the future.
It has also created the kind of financial order that I had been missing, making me feel calmer about what is – after all – a fairly critical part of adult life.
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