I have an excel spread sheet which works out our net worth, profit & loss sheet along with a budget. It is a bit of a doozy since we now work in Northern Ireland, but formerly lived and still have 5 investment properties in New Zealand, so it has to track them as well.

For our budget and thus profit and loss sheet I sat down and tried to tote up realistically all the one off expenses we face in a year (including furniture etc) and put them all into the budget. I then break them down into yearly – monthly and weekly expenses. I then put money into a specific savings account for those yearly expenses so that the money is gone from our current account, and we don’t get the mistaken impression we are better off than we are.

Cheers
David