Money Groundwork — Life-Events Finance Toolkit

A neat annual budget isn’t much help when your income and your costs are both about to move. This is a spreadsheet for one life change and the three months around it: a new home, a baby, a job change, going freelance, or moving country.

Eight tabs.

Start here — you pick the event and it sets the cost categories and the questions.

Setup — your income, fixed costs and the details of the change. Type into the amber cells; the rest works itself out.

The Event — every one-off cost, first as an estimate and later as the real number, with a checklist of the ones people usually forget.

90-Day Cashflow — thirteen weeks laid out. Any week you’d dip under your buffer goes red.

Sinking Funds — a dated future cost split into a monthly amount you can plan for.

Subscription Audit — what your recurring charges add up to, and how much cutting some frees up.

Can I Afford This? — a quick check that reads from your other tabs before you commit.

Dashboard — total cost, what’s covered, the gap, weeks of runway. One screen.

The formulas are real. Change one number and everything downstream updates. It shows euros by default, with one place to switch that to pounds or dollars.

What you get: one .xlsx file. It opens in Excel, in Google Sheets, and in Numbers. Open it once so it calculates. It’s a planning and record-keeping tool, not financial advice, and the rules vary by country.