If you want to reach financial or money goals, you have to have the road map laid out for how you’re going to reach them. There is no better tool for this than Microsoft Excel. If you know what you are doing, then the flexibility it provides as well as the customization capabilities of Microsoft Excel makes it the most powerful budgeting tool out there.
The trick to setting your goals is laying it all out on a timeline so that you can see very visually what it will take to reach your goals and how long it will take to get there. You can also look at this and see if you’re being realistic about it.
The trick to this is laying out the timeline in Excel. This is going to require some light formatting skills and a date formula that lets you set it up so you can change the starting date and all of the dates update automatically from there. This will save you time next year when you are ready to copy and paste this all over into a new year.