A first time, for me, “live-coding” kind of session, online, with the amazing folks from Indexnine Technologies, on building a “starter” Financial Planner spread sheet, from scratch, in under 90 minutes. Thanks Shashank Parab for agreeing to the experiment.

Started with an empty spreadsheet, built the various elements needed to build a plan and get answers, ranging from Goals dashboard, to the Cashflow statement, to the Expense tracker, Income Projector, Budgeting and also a sheet to keep consolidated view of all the Savings.

The questions we were trying to address are:

• How much CAN I save ? (Those that don’t like the goal based approach)
• How much SHOULD I save ? (Those that have goals identified, and prefer that approach)

Both of these, because everyone has a different stage in life. The beauty of this exercise was that there was no need to create or fill all of those mentioned. You could start at any of these, and just get to the answers based on approximations. The more data you filled, the more accurate the projections.

Lot of fun. The audience size was large, but we managed to have some good interaction. Interesting points raise, that I will try to incorporate in my future versions of this.