For many years I used a 1% cash back credit card for all my purchases.

While this wasn’t a bad move – 1% is better than nothing, which is what you get from a debit card – it’s not ideal.

There are credit cards that offer 2% cash back on every purchase, which is double what I was getting. There are also many cards that have lucrative sign-up offers that I was completely missing out on.

If you start utilizing credit card rewards to make your vacations free or cheap, or to collect free cash back rewards, you are likely going to have a number of cards open. Some of these cards inevitably will come with an annual fee, or with a sign-up bonus that you must achieve within a certain amount of time (e.g. spend $2,000 within the first 4 months of card opening to earn 50,000 points that can be redeemed for a $500 statement credit, for example).

Between cash back credit cards, airline credit cards, and “point” credit cards, my wife and I have multiple credit cards.

It can be difficult to keep everything straight when you have multiple cards open, so I asked myself recently: why don’t I just take a few minutes when I open a card to record information in a spreadsheet?.

I create spreadsheets all the time. I work in spreadsheets all day at work and spreadsheet consulting is one of my side hustles. Many times it’s a no-brainer to me that setting up a spreadsheet is a good idea.

So I created a credit card rewards tracking spreadsheet in Excel.

The Credit Card Rewards Tracking Spreadsheet in Excel

 
The spreadsheet I created is simple yet effective. It can help you avoid forgetting about a card and having it renew, and it will help you keep a history of the rewards that you’ve gained so far.

 
This spreadsheet has a variety of columns to capture everything you would want to know about the card you signed up for, including when you would want to cancel it by to avoid the annual fee. The columns include:

• Number
• Credit Card Name
• Company
• Business or Personal
• Date Opened
• Date Annual Fee Hits
• Closed?
• Annual Fee
• Annual Fee Waived First Year?
• Bonus: Spend Required
• Bonus: Spend Timeline
• Bonus Complete By Date
• Bonus Description
• Bonus Program
• Who Signed Up?
• Notes

When you download the file you’ll see an example credit card I added in the first row. This example can serve as a guide to populate your credit cards. You can also add or delete columns as you see fit.

I’ve been using this spreadsheet for over five years and it’s one that I keep going back to. I have yet to see a better system for managing all your credit cards and tracking rewards and annual fees.

If you want the free credit card rewards tracking spreadsheet fill in the form below and it will be sent to your email.

There are a ton of budgeting apps out there, but many people end up using some sort of a spreadsheet for their budget.

Spreadsheets offer control and flexibility to users, and allows them to look closer at the transactions going through their accounts.

I have nothing against apps. Many people find them useful, and there’s no denying that there are a ton of good ones out there.

But I personally have used a budget spreadsheet for years and have found it useful. The more people I talk to about budgeting, the more I hear that people desire a spreadsheet-based budget without all the manual work that comes with it.

Today we finally have a budget spreadsheet in Excel that is automated and easy to update. But first let me tell you a bit about the budgeting process I’ve used in the past.

My Budgeting Process

 
I’m an Excel nerd so using a spreadsheet to budget was a no-brainer for me. I’ve had the same spreadsheet for over four years now. But why haven’t I shared it?

When I share spreadsheets and tools I want them to be as easy to use as possible. The biggest issue with spreadsheet budgeting is getting all the data in the proper format.

I have a number of credit cards due to credit card churning, plus throw in a bank account and you can see why it would take quite a bit of time to reformat everything. No two financial institutions seem to export data in the same format. So there’s a lot of work on the backend.

I didn’t want to share a budgeting spreadsheet until I solved this key piece of the puzzle. Fast forward four years and I still haven’t shared a spreadsheet.

That all changed when I discovered Tiller.

Tiller – The Key to Automation

 
Tiller is what I have been waiting for: it automates the process of pulling in your financial data into a clean, uniform format.

Now there are a ton of apps out there that link to your accounts. But they don’t allow you to dump your data into a spreadsheet because they either haven’t built a tool that can do that or they have a huge incentive to not allow their users to dump data into a spreadsheet.

Once you sign up for Tiller you simply have to connect your accounts and your financial transactions will be dumped into a Google Spreadsheet each day. They will come through in a uniform format that looks something like this:

 
Tiller does cost money. You can use my link for a free 30 day trial, but after that it’s $6.58/month. If you’re like me and spend an hour or more getting your data into a uniform format or have avoided budgeting because you don’t want to take the time to mess with your data, $6.58/month is well worth what you are getting in return for Tiller’s service. (Don’t worry they have a 60-day money-back guarantee as well).

Tiller has bank-grade security and has partnered with a company that works with some of the biggest banks in North America to ensure it’s up to the same high standards banks are held to. What was even more reassuring to me was hearing that their employees can’t even see your financial data. You can read more about their security and other features of their service on their website.

I’m all for Google Sheets, and Tiller absolutely can work simply using Google Sheets, but Excel is where it’s at if you want a clean and good-looking budget spreadsheet.

So I took it a step further and created an automated budget spreadsheet in Excel.

An Automated Budget Spreadsheet in Excel

 
Tiller is a great start, but my automated budget spreadsheet in Excel is where people will feel most “at home.” Excel is widely used and I’ve created a spreadsheet that someone with limited experience can use.

The spreadsheet has a directions tab that guides you through the process of updating the spreadsheet with your data. It also points out best practices that will help you not “break” the file.

 
The data tab is where you will want to paste your Tiller data. The data will then become part of a table that uses formulas to automatically populate the monthly summary tabs and the annual summary tabs.

Note that Tiller does not automatically populate the category for each transaction. Having the user populate the category allows the user to assign relevant categories and look at the transactions at a lower level of detail than they would if category was auto-filled.
 

 
On the categories tab you can add or delete categories as you see fit.
 

 
On the monthly summary tabs, everything is automated except for the budget column and the categories. You can add and delete categories as you see fit. You can unhide the hidden rows towards the bottom if you need to add more categories.

Everything is formula-driven, making it easy to see a snapshot for the month. While tabs have already been created for each month in 2024, you can easily make a copy of any of the months tab and choose a different month and year drop-down as you see fit. Everything will update automatically for whatever month you choose.
 

 
One additional thing included in this file is the annual summary. If you go to the 2024 tab you can see an annual summary of your income and expenses by month. This is automatically populated and you can easily make a summary for future years by choosing a different year from the drop-down.
 

 
This spreadsheet takes a lot of the manual work out of the budgeting process and gives you nice clean views of your financials, both budgeted versus actual as well as net inflow and outflow of cash.

My hope is that this easier process of importing and tagging data will encourage others to start budgeting. After all, using this process you can easily update your budget in less than 30 minute a month, perhaps even less than 10 minutes depending on how many transactions you need to tag.

A popular topic in personal finance is passive income.

Income that doesn’t require you to trade your time for money is “the dream” for many people.

There are many different forms of passive income, but the ultimate passive income is dividend income.

Dividend income comes from owning dividend-paying stocks. Not every company pays dividends. If a company is focused 100% on growth, they are going to use all their earnings to continue to grow their business.

With that being said there are many large companies that are focused on growth that pay a dividend. In fact it would almost be silly for a publicly traded company to not have a growth strategy.

Many of the large blue chip companies pay dividends, though their dividend yield (Amount paid out in dividends annually divided by current stock price) can vary. For example, Best Buy has a relatively high dividend yield of 4.18%, while Visa has a modest 0.80% dividend yield.

Even if you have other financial priorities that take precedence, learning and being aware of the opportunities that come with dividend income can motivate people to save more money, pay off debt faster, and make more money so that they can take advantage of all the benefits that come from dividend income.

With that in mind, let’s get to the real question here: how much can you make in dividend income?

How Much Can You Make in Dividend Income?

 
The first thing I need to say before answering this question is this: it’s not easy to make a sizable amount of dividend income. If it was easy no one would work and everyone would simply live off of their passive dividend income.

Using the spreadsheet I created, let’s look at what you would be able to make annually from dividends if you invested $5,000 in 3M stocks:

 
Okay so you’d only make $123 each year. Now that may not feel like much, but remember it’s also reasonable to expect 3M’s stock to appreciate over time. Also, don’t forget how great dividend income is: you are getting $123 by simply owning $5,000 worth of 3M stock! No effort required.

Let’s take a look at a higher investment amount: $100,000.

 
Nearly $2,500 a year – not too bad! You can see why dividend income is so attractive, especially to those looking to retire early or who don’t want to spend down their assets in retirement.

Quick math shows that owning $1 million of 3M stock would yield $25,000 a year in entirely passive income. Do you have $2 million to invest? double it up to $50,000 a year.

I don’t know about you, but this sort of scenario analysis is incredibly motivating to me.

I spend most of my free time working on side hustles to increase my income, and while paying off debt is the primary goal right now, long-term I would love to regularly funnel “extra” side hustle income into dividend-paying stocks.

If you are an entrepreneur or want to be an entrepreneur, dividend income just might give you the motivation needed to put in the long hours and hard work to build your business. After all, if you are able to sell for a couple million dollars – or more – you very well could live off of passive dividend income the rest of your life.

It’s an easy way to save over $1,000 in one year. $1,378 to be exact.

The 52 Week Money Challenge is realistic for anyone because it doesn’t require the same amount of money to be saved each week. That’s because over the course of 52 weeks you save as little as $1 and, at most, $52.

Let’s take a more detailed look at how the 52 Week Money Challenge works, and some alternative ways of doing the challenge.

How the 52 Week Money Challenge Works

 
The 52 Week Money Challenge is simple. Over the course of 52 weeks, you make a deposit into your savings account once a week. The deposits range in value from $1 to $52.

One way people do this is deposit $1 the first week, $2 the second week, $3 the third week, and so on. At the end of 52 weeks the deposits total $1,378.

Another way to do this is vary the payments. Perhaps you deposit $52 the first week, $1 the second week, $51 the third week, and so on. This works well when there are busy times, like Christmas, where money is tighter, or if you have an unexpected expense that sets you back.

Being able to adjust your weekly contribution as needed is an added layer of flexibility to the challenge, but not everyone takes that approach. It can be easier to just stick with increasing your contribution each week by $1. Who knows? Maybe you will even continue past the 52 weeks.

Another variation is to multiply the amount you save. Depositing $1 through $52 is great because you will save $1,378 in one year, but why not up the ante? If you deposit $5 through $260 in increments of $5, you would have nearly $7,000 saved. This is a great way to make a game out of building an emergency fund.

I recommend having a separate savings fund at a different bank than your home bank or credit union to create a separation between the money you have for spending and the money you are saving for a rainy day. My choice is a high-yield savings account at CIT Bank. Many banks pay almost nothing in interest for their savings account. You deserve to get a high interest rate on your savings account, and CIT Bank is a great option.

Download the 52 Week Money Challenge Spreadsheet and Printable

 
If the 52 Week Money Challenge sounds like something that you want to try, we have a free 52 Week Money Challenge Spreadsheet and Printable for you.

If you want the spreadsheet or printable, you can get a free copy below.

Don’t miss out on our free budget spreadsheet or these travel rewards credit cards that can help you achieve your travel goals faster.

Student loans can be complex. Annoyingly complex. Even painful. All the emotions.

There is no magical way to get rid of them quickly, especially if you have a lot of them.

The one thing you can do, though, is feel in control. To do that you need to get organized.

The best way to get organized is by putting all your data in a spreadsheet.

So naturally you may be wondering how to track your student loans in a spreadsheet?

You’re in luck – I have a free student loan spreadsheet that you can download.

This spreadsheet will help you get a good overall picture of your student loans, but it goes further than that. It will also run an analysis on your loans for income-driven repayment plans, provides a few repayment calculators, and more.

Grab the student loan spreadsheet by entering your email in the box below, or scroll on to read more about the spreadsheet.

• Instructions on Where to Find your Student Loans – Whether you have federal, private, or state student loans, there are instructions on how to find the details of your student loans.

• Tracking Tab to House all your Student Loan Details – The most important part of the spreadsheet. This will be where all your student loan detail is laid out in a nice snapshot.

• Student Loan Repayment Calculators – Three different student loan calculators that help you visualize what sort of impact putting additional dollars towards your loans will have.

• Weighted Average Interest Rate Calculation – Simplifies various calculations by giving you one interest rate that can be used in all your student loan repayment calculations.

• Income-Driven Repayment Calculator – Shows your estimated monthly payment under the various income-driven repayment plans.

• Federal Poverty Guidelines – Helps with calculating income-driven repayment.

• Principal vs. Interest – Curious how much of each individual payment is going towards interest versus principal? This tool will help you visualize it.

 
Here’s more detail around the tabs you’ll find in the spreadsheet:

This student loan spreadsheet has so many features that a table of contents felt necessary. This helps you easily jump to different sections of the spreadsheet.

There are instructions within the spreadsheet on how to find all your student loans, regardless of whether they are federal, private, or through a State.

This main tracking tab within the file is the most important and is the one that you will update over time with your student loan information. When you initially populate it you will identify whether your student loans are federal, private, or state, what the interest rate is on each loan, what the principal balance is, and more.

There are three student loan repayment calculators:

• Standard Ten-Year Repayment – Enter your loan balance and your interest rate and this calculator will tell you what your monthly payment is under the standard ten-year repayment plan.

• Goal Payoff Date – Do you have a goal date that you want to pay off your loans by? Curious how much you’d have to put towards your loans each month to make it happen? This calculator will tell you.

• Goal Monthly Payment – Curious how much faster your loans will be paid off if you put an extra hundred, two hundred, or more, towards your loans each month? This calculator is for you.

Weighted Average Interest Rate Calculation

Most people have a number of student loans, but for various estimates and calculations you want just one dollar amount (your total student loan debt) and one interest rate. This calculator will help you find what your weighted average interest rate is, which then can be used in calculators like the repayment ones I described above..

Income-Driven Repayment Calculator

Curious what your estimated payment would be if you switched from the standard ten-year repayment plan to an income-driven repayment plan? This calculator gives you an estimate of what your new monthly minimum payment will be under the various plans.

Income-driven repayment plans can sometimes feel a bit complicated, as they factor in the federal poverty level, family size, and adjusted gross income. This tab will simplify that for you, allowing you to select from drop-downs to automatically run calculations that are used in the income-driven repayment estimates described above.

Have you been making payments towards your student loans for a while now but the balance doesn’t seem to drop much? If you’re on the standard ten-year repayment plan it’s because a greater percentage of your payment goes towards interest early on in repayment. This tab shows the detail behind the 120 payments and you can clearly see how the split between principal and interest changes over time.

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Get the Free Student Loan Spreadsheet

 
Ready to download the free student loan spreadsheet and access all the features? Simply enter your email below and we will send you a copy.

 
Remember, the first step to conquering your student loans is understanding them. The sooner you understand your loans and repayment options, the sooner you can put together a repayment strategy that fits with your life. No two situations are the same, and I encourage you to do what makes the most sense for your specific situation.

If you have a Health Savings Account, or HSA, and aren’t using it to pay for medical epenxes, you are missing out on tax benefits.

As we explain in our Health Savings Account Guide, HSAs have a triple-tax advantage:

• Put Money in Pre-Tax – Contributions put into an HSA are not taxed. Meaning, your adjusted gross income on your taxes will decrease by the amount you deposit.

• Interest and Investment Gains are Not Taxed – Once your cash balance hits a certain threshold (i.e. $1,000, $2,000, etc.) you can shift any money above the threshold into an investment account. The investment gains are not taxed.

• Withdraw Money Tax-Free – When you withdraw money to cover a qualified medical expense you are not taxed on the withdrawal. In general a qualified medical expense is defined as an expense that pays for healthcare services, medications, or equipment. Clear-cut examples include a prescription you get at a pharmacy or a bill from a doctor visit.

At a minimum, it makes sense to deposit money into your HSA and reimburse yourself for qualified expenses so that you are paying with before-tax dollars.

So how much can you contribute to an HSA? For 2023 the IRS has set contribution limits for HSAs to $3,850 for an individual or $7,750 for a family. For those over the age of 55 there is an opportunity to contribute an additional $1,000.

Besides contributing to your HSA and reimbursing yourself for qualified medical expenses, there are a couple of other ways to optimize your HSA. You can read a more detailed explanation in our post 2 Hacks to Maximize your HSA Health Savings Account, but at a high level they are:

• Pay with a credit card, not with your HSA debit card – When you pay with your HSA debit card, you don’t receive any rewards like cash back or points. Use a rewards credit card that either provides you with travel rewards or cash back. You can view all the latest credit card sign-up offers here.

• Track your qualified medical expenses, then reimburse them years down the road from investment gains – What most people don’t realize is there is no time limit for reimbursing your expenses from your HSA. Meaning, if you incur a qualified expense in 2023, for example, you can reimburse it at any point in the future, even years down the road (you must have had an HSA when the expense was incurred for it to be eligible for reimbursement).

The benefit of tracking your medical expenses and reimbursing later on is that you can keep more cash in your HSA, which allows you to invest more money. Remember, the investment gains are not taxed, so you can keep building your investments tax-free.

Think of the alternative. If you reimburse yourself for a medical expense immediately from your HSA, that cash exits your tax-sheltered HSA account, and you miss out on all the tax-free investment gains.

HSA Medical Expense Tracking Spreadsheet

 
The best way to track your medical expenses is in a spreadsheet. That way you have a record of what expenses you’ve paid for but haven’t reimbursed from your HSA. Then at any point in the future you can reimburse yourself for some or all of the expenses in your spreadsheet.

Here’s my approach:

• Create a folder to store your receipts.
   
  Include the date and some sort of unique descriptor (e.g. 2022_12_15 Chiropractic Block of Care Robert).

• Add the expense to a tracking spreadsheet.
   
  In the first column, include the name of the receipt (e.g. 2022_12_15 Chiropractic Block of Care Robert). That way you can easily locate the receipt that aligns to the row. Remember, if you use the strategy of reimbursing yourself later on, you may need to go back years later – make it easy on yourself. Include other details in the spreadsheet such as what payment was used, the servicer/company you paid, cost, etc.

Instead of starting from scratch you can grab a copy of our free HSA medical expense tracking spreadsheet.

I included a couple examples in it to give you an idea of the type of details you may want to record. You can grab this spreadsheet for free by entering your email in the below form:

There are many ways to maximize your Health Savings Account, or HSA.

We list many of these in our Health Savings Account (HSA) Guide. This guide also provides a nice overview for those who are a newer to Health Savings Accounts.

They include things like:

• Shifting dollars from the savings portion of your HSA to the investment portion of your HSA, which allows your balance to grow tax-free (as long as you withdraw for elgibile medical expenses)

• Maxing out your HSA contributions each year

• Making sure you aren’t missing out on elibible expenses

While some of the more basic hacks to maximize your HSA are a good starting point, there are a couple of hacks that most people don’t know about.

And when I say hacks, let me be clear: these are all 100% legal ways to take full advantage of your Health Savings Account.

If you are ready to take your HSA game to the next level, here’s two things you can do:

Hack #1: Pay with a credit card, not with your HSA debit card

 
Similar to how a bank provides you a debit card that allows you to make purchases directly from your bank account, HSA providers also provide a debit card so that you can make purchases directly from your account.

The problem with an HSA debit card is that you miss out on credit card rewards, such as cash back and travel rewards.

There is no requirement to use an HSA debit card to use your HSA. You can use any form of payment, even cash, to make purchases. Then all you need to do is reimburse yourself.

It may feel like an extra step, but over time medical spend can really add up. Additionally, when you pay with a credit card it gets you in the practice of uploading a receipt when you go in and reimburse yourself. When you use an HSA debit card, it can be easy to not keep a copy of your receipt.

One other thing to think about is the fact that medical expenses can sometimes be quite material. We had our first kid in 2023 and we knew that the bill would be in the thousands, since we have a high deductible health plan.

So what we did was we signed up for a new credit card that required a certain amount of spend to receive their sign-up bonus (e.g. $2,000 within the first four months to get 50,000 points, which translated to a $500 statement credit). We easily put the required amount on the card when we paid the hospital bill.

To recap: pay with a credit card for the rewards, save the receipt, and go into your HSA servicer’s portal to reimburse yourself.

Hack #2: Track your qualified medical expenses, then reimburse them years down the road from investment gains

 
This second hack builds off of the first one.

Something that most people don’t realize with a Health Savings Account is that there is not a time limit for when you can reimburse yourself for a qualified medical expense.

Practically speaking, you could have a hospital bill of $1,500 in 2023 that you paid for with a credit card. As long as you save the receipt and keep a record of the expense, you can reimburse yourself 5, 10, 15, or even 40 years later.

One thing to keep in mind is that the eligible expense does need to occur when you have a high deductible health plan and an HSA. So if you had a bill in 2021 but didn’t have an HSA until 2023, you can’t go back and reimburse that 2021 bill.

This is a huge benefit for a few different reasons:

• You keep more cash in your HSA
   
  With an HSA you can put money in pre-tax and take money out pre-tax (as long as it’s for an eligible medical expense). While that cash is in your HSA, you can also invest it.
   
  What this means specifically for our example of a $1,500 hospital bill in 2023 is that you don’t have to take out $1,500 in 2023. You can let that $1,500 you would have taken out and let it grow via mutual fund investments in your HSA until 2023, in which case you can withdraw it. So instead of paying $1,500 with little investment gains in 2023, you can potentially take out $1,500 ten years later totally from investment gains.

• You Build up a Secondary Cash Emergency Fund
   
  If you take this approach you can, at any time, reimburse yourself for your expenses. You don’t have to wait until years down the road.
   
  Let’s say over the course of a couple years you have $2,000 of eligible medical expenses. That means any day you could log into your HSA servicer’s portal and reimburse yourself for $2,000 worth of expenses.
   
  I often talk about an HSA being a medical emergency fund, which it is, but if you are able to hold off reimbursing yourself you can build up a cash reserve that can be tapped, tax-free, at any given time in the future. The longer you hold off on reimbursing yourself, the larger this fund will be.

• Future Medical Expenses May Be Massive
   
  In general, I think the annual contribution limits for Health Savings ACcounts are relatively low.
   
  For example, in 2023 the limits are $3,850 for an individual or $7,750 for a family. To be clear, I am not saying this is a small amount of money and there is certainly an argument to be made that there is an increasing divide of those who have well-funded HSAs and those who do not. But what I am saying is that health care expenses are becoming more and more material, especially for seniors. If you let your HSA grow while you are in your 20s, 30s, and 40s, you will have more tax-free assets to use later in life for expensive medical care such as long-term care in a facility or in-home care.
   
  With this in mind, the more money you can keep within your HSA the more you can invest within your HSA and the larger your nest egg will be for future expenses.
   
  And remember: in a pinch, as long as you tracked your expenses you can always get reimbursed from your HSA. Which is why this hack works so well.

Tracking Your Medical Expenses

 
The best way to track your medical expenses is in a spreadsheet. What I do is this:

• Create a folder to store your receipts. Include the date and some sort of unique descriptor (e.g. 2022_12_15 Chiropractic Block of Care Robert).

• Add the expense to a tracking spreadsheet. In the first column, include the name of the receipt (e.g. 2022_12_15 Chiropractic Block of Care Robert). That way you can easily locate the receipt that aligns to the row. Remember, if you use the strategy of reimbursing yourself later on, you may need to go back years later – make it easy on yourself. Include other details in the spreadsheet such as what payment was used, the servicer/company you paid, cost, etc.

Instead of starting from scratch you can grab a copy of our free medical expense tracking spreadsheet. I included a couple examples in it to give you an idea of the type of details you may want to record. You can grab this spreadsheet for free by entering your email in the below form:

 
To recap:

Get yourself a solid rewards credit card instead of using the HSA servicer’s debit card.
 
Start tracking your medical expenses and saving your receipts.