Step 4: Turn it around!įacing the numbers and looking for ways to cut spending, increase income, or changing spending habits can be a messy uncomfortable process. Wherever you spend, however much you owe, whatever you save - Your monthly totals are not your self worth, it’s your starting line.
Feeling overwhelmed and stressed is normal. Add it up: Tally your monthly expenses.If you see ways to simplify this or if you think the spreadsheet is missing an important angle, please let me know in an e-mail or a comment below this post. I’ve also left comments throughout the spreadsheet (look for the orange triangle at the upper-right corner of a cell) explaining what goes where. In addition, you’ll see a box in which you can plug in the relevant numbers for a home-office deduction, but I recognize that not every 1099-income type will claim that. When possible, I’ve aligned types of costs with TurboTax’s vocabulary to reduce springtime tax-prep confusion. This template is organized by types of expense, with the biggest categories in my case–travel and meals and entertainment–getting their own sheets.
Here you go: Make a copy of this template (go to the File menu and select “Make a copy…”) to your Google account and get to work. I was glad to give my friend a boost past that phase, and now I want to do the same for any self-employed types reading this. Instead, I had to survive some excruciatingly stupid accounting practices and eventually thumb-wrestle my way to marginal competence.
A friend of mine started freelancing at the end of last year, so I decided to give him a boring but useful present: a blank copy of the Google Docs spreadsheet I use to track my expenses.Ī systematic, easily smartphone-accessible way to record the costs of doing business–organized so you can copy the year-end totals into your Schedule C tax form–is exactly the thing I needed when I started freelancing almost eight years ago.
0 kommentar(er)
