The Spreadsheet That Changed My Relationship With Future Me

I had maintained a budget since I was 24 and had been operating it as a present-tense document - what was coming in, what was going out, what remained.

At 28, in Kolkata, a financial planning session that a work benefit provided prompted me for the first time to build a projection forward rather than only a ledger of the present. The exercise was technically straightforward and emotionally surprising.

I built a simple model showing what my current behaviour - the savings rate, the investment choices, the pension contribution - would produce at forty, at fifty, at sixty. The numbers at forty were fine.

The numbers at sixty were not what I had imagined they would be when I had vaguely pictured a comfortable future without doing the arithmetic that would have shown whether the comfort was funded.

The gap between the future I had been assuming and the future my current behaviour was actually producing was large enough to be motivating rather than paralyzing, which I think was partly luck and partly timing.

The changes I made in response to the model were not dramatic in any individual instance but were compounding in their combined effect: the pension contribution raised by four percent, the investment amount increased by a modest fixed sum each month, a specific target for the emergency fund established and funded.

None of these required significant sacrifice from the present. Together they changed the forty-year projection materially. What the model gave me, more than the specific numbers, was a relationship with my future self that the present-tense budget had never established.

I had been living in a financial present with no connection to the financial future that present was building. The spreadsheet introduced me to the person who was going to live with my choices.