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

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) If you are a millennial like me, you are probably a bit tired. We studied hard, found a job, started building something for our families, and now the ground keeps moving under us.

On top of that, we have lived through a currency that lost half its value, an economic crisis, queues for fuel and gas, and prices that doubled while salaries did not. Anyone who says planning is easy here has not tried it.

I cannot control any of that. 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 we 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 some land and had a fixed deposit, but I could not tell you what our family was actually worth after the lease, the loans and the card. 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 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 your fixed deposits and divides 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. Gold and dollars are kept out of this number on purpose, because selling gold in a panic is not an emergency fund.

Your family net worth. Husband and wife together. Every account, every deposit, EPF, gold, land and property, minus every loan, lease and pawning ticket.

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

How much you hold in dollars and gold. Shown as a percentage of your savings. We have all watched the rupee weaken. Most families keep some savings in dollars or gold because of it. This sheet shows you exactly how much, so it is a decision and not an accident.

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

What is inside

There are eight tabs.

Rates and Assumptions is where you set the dollar rate and the gold price per gram. One pawun is eight grams, so divide the pawun price by eight. Change it in one place and the whole sheet updates. There is also a share price box, but that is only for shares your company gave you. If you bought shares on the CSE yourself, you do not need a price at all. Just put the total portfolio value into the Assets tab.

Assets covers current and savings accounts, fixed deposits, EPF and ETF for both of you, treasury bills, unit trusts, CSE shares, gold in grams, crypto, insurance surrender value, and money you have lent out. If you hold dollars, there are separate rows for a dollar account, money sitting in Wise or Payoneer, and dollars kept at home. You enter the dollar amount and the sheet converts it.

Liabilities covers credit cards, vehicle lease, housing loan, personal loan, pawning, bank overdraft, money borrowed from family, and anything you still owe the IRD.

Properties has space for ten. Land and built property, with rent, rates and upkeep, so you can see the real yield instead of guessing. Six are filled in as examples and four are spare.

Cash Flow is the important one. Every income line and every expense line, including the ones we always forget. Tuition classes. The school van. Avurudu. Parent support. Insurance renewals. Vehicle service.

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 Nugegoda and your house 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 few things worth knowing

Pawning. It is fast and easy, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. The interest builds every month and plenty of families have lost gold they fully intended to redeem. The sheet lists pawning as a liability and tells you to clear it first, along with the credit card.

Sinking funds. Avurudu, school term fees, the big vehicle service and insurance renewals come every single year. They are not surprises. Divide each yearly cost by twelve and set that aside monthly. This one habit is what stops New Year from turning into credit card debt.

EPF and ETF. This is real money and it belongs in your net worth. But you cannot touch it now, so the sheet keeps it in a separate line called Locked. Do not count it as your safety net.

Land. Land that earns no rent is not income, however much the value has gone up. Track it, be happy about it, but do not plan your monthly life around it. And only raise the value in the sheet when you have a real comparable sale nearby, not a feeling.

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 together 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 rupee. 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.