Know Your Numbers: A Free Financial Plan Sheet for Sri Lankan Families in Singapore

We are living in a strange time. AI is changing jobs faster than most of us can follow. Every week there is news about some new tool that can do part of what we do at work. (Claude Fable 5 and Opus 5 from Anthropic, GPT-5.6 Sol from OpenAI — and yes, Opus 5 literally dropped in my inbox while I was writing this 😄) If you are a millennial like me, you are probably a bit tired. We came here to work hard, save, build something for our families back home, and now the ground keeps moving under us.

I cannot control what AI does to the job market. Nobody can. But I noticed something about my own stress. Most of it was not coming from the news. It was coming from not knowing my own numbers.

I did not know exactly how much my wife and I spent in a month. I did not know how long our savings would last if one of us lost a job tomorrow. I knew we owned property back home, but I could not tell you what our family was actually worth after all the loans. These are simple questions. I just never sat down and answered them.

So I built a spreadsheet to answer them. Now I am sharing it, free.

What this sheet tells you

Once you fill it in, you will know:

Your monthly cash flow. Every rupee and every dollar coming in, and everything going out. Not a guess. The real number.

Your emergency fund, in months. This is the one that changed how I sleep. The sheet takes your cash and divides it by your monthly expenses. It tells you plainly: if income stopped today, we last this many months. Six months is the target most people should aim for.

Your family net worth. Both husband and wife together. Everything you own in Singapore and in Sri Lanka, minus everything you owe.

Your current passive income. Rent from home, dividends, anything that comes in without you going to work. And how far that is from covering your monthly costs.

A health check. Debt compared to assets, credit card usage, how much of your income goes to loan payments, and the real yield on your property after tax and upkeep.

What is inside

There are eight tabs.

Rates and Assumptions is where you set the SGD to LKR rate and the gold price per gram. There are also two boxes for share price. Those are only for RSU or ESPP shares you get from your company, because for those you enter the number of shares and the sheet works out the value. For any other shares you bought yourself, you do not need a price at all. You simply put the total account value into the Assets tab under brokerage net liq. Change a rate in one place and the whole sheet updates.

Assets covers bank accounts here and in Sri Lanka, fixed deposits, CPF if you are a PR, brokerage accounts, gold in grams, RSUs and ESPP from work, and money you have lent to people.

Liabilities covers credit cards, personal loans, home loans in Sri Lanka, car loans, tax you still owe IRAS, and money borrowed from family.

Properties has space for ten. Land and built property, with rent, tax and upkeep, so you can see the real yield.

Cash Flow is the important one. Every income line and every expense line, including the ones we usually forget. Parent support. The annual trip home. Insurance renewals. Festival gifts.

Summary reads everything and gives you the full picture on one screen.

Plan and Rules is for your goal and the rules you and your partner agree on together.

How to use it

The sheet I am sharing is view only. Please do not ask for edit access. Instead:

Open the link, then click File, then Make a Copy. Now it is yours. It sits in your own Google Drive, nobody else can see it, and you can change anything you want.

Then one important thing about the colours.

Blue numbers are yours. Type over them. These are your balances, your salary, your bills.

Black numbers are formulas. Do not touch them.

Green numbers pull from another tab. Do not touch them either.

If you overwrite a black or green number, the sheet stops calculating and you will get wrong answers without knowing it.

Text is different. Feel free to change any category name, any item name, and any description. If a row says “Colombo Apartment” and yours is in Kurunegala, rename it. If a row does not apply to you at all, just put 0 in the blue cell. Do not delete the row. Putting zero keeps all the formulas working.

What the result looks like

The sheet comes with example numbers already filled in. Replace every blue cell with yours and the whole picture updates instantly.

A note for those of us on work passes

If you are on an EP or S Pass, you have no CPF. Your employer medical cover ends the day your job ends. Tax clearance comes due when you leave. This is why our emergency fund needs to be bigger than a local family’s, not smaller. The sheet has notes about this in the right places.

Download

Download the Financial Plan Sheet

Remember: open it, then File, then Make a Copy.

It takes about an hour the first time, and fifteen minutes a month after that. Do it with your husband or wife, not alone. The whole value of this thing is that both of you are looking at the same screen and agreeing on the same numbers.

We cannot control AI. We cannot control the job market. We can control whether we know our own situation. That is worth one hour of a Sunday.

If you found this useful, I’d really appreciate it if you left a review on Topmate — it helps other families find it too.