Tiller Money Review 2020 (Finally a Synced Spreadsheet Budget!)

The Foundation Template is the beginning of your Tiller experience, and it’s where the magic happens. You can add to it with additional templates, but the Foundation Template includes prebuilt sheets for tracking your spending, budgeting, visualizing trends, etc. It feels a lot like the dashboard you see in other personal finance apps.

Here’s everything you’ll see in your Foundation Template:

• Instant financial insights about your spending and balance trends
• Net worth at a glance, and you can go to the balances sheet to see your net worth broken down by assets and liabilities
• Transactions sheets that show your daily financial transactions, which you can customize and categorize
• Balances and balance history
• Monthly budgets that you can customize to fit your needs and break things down by type, group, and category
• Yearly budget that shows your annual cash flow and for projecting next year’s budget
• Customizable categories sheets where you can create up to 200 different spending categories
• Cloud-based collaboration so you can share and use your templates with someone else (spouse, business partner, accountant, etc.)

M$M tip: For more on how to start using Google Sheets, I have a comprehensive guide that walks you through the process of creating a budget in Sheets: How to Make a Budget Spreadsheet in Google Sheets (Step-By-Step Guide for 2020!). You can find the best free Google Sheets Templates at Best Free Google Sheets Budget Templates (and How to Use Them!)

For anyone who wants to get serious about destroying their debt, this Tiller Lab spreadsheet can be used alone or as an add-on to your Fondation Template. It collects information about your debt (what you shared when you signed up for Tiller and linked your accounts) and puts all of your liabilities in one place. Just like the rest of Tiller, your Debt Progress Spreadsheet is updated daily to reflect new transactions, payments, and balances.

But here’s the cool part, you can use Tiller to help you develop an effective debt payoff strategy. It will model different scenarios and timelines based on your monthly payments, and you can set it to use the debt avalanche or snowball method.

If you have any questions or issues, you can contact Tiller via online chat or email at [email protected]

In 2019, the Tiller Money Community was released, and Tiller calls it a “positive new forum for spreadsheet and personal finance enthusiasts.” It kind of sounds like the Millennial Money Man Facebook community.

This community of like-minded spreadsheet junkies can help you get even more out of Tiller experience. You can ask questions about linking accounts, syncing bank feeds, budgeting strategies, etc. The moderator team also posts challenges, ideas, and workflows.

If you know me at all, you know I’m a huge proponent of starting a side hustle. But the reality is that not all side hustles are the same. I like the ones that are flexible, pay well, and can be scaled into larger opportunities.

Tiller Money has its own side hustle ranking system: realistic, lucrative, and worthwhile. These guidelines have been used to rank 145 different side hustles ideas, which are sorted by:

• Complexity
• Monthly earning range
• How realistic they are
• The average time to get your first $1,000
• Introvert index

The point is to help you pick the best possible side hustle. If you want to hear my opinions on side hustles, check out the 22 Best 2020 Side Hustle Ideas (Make $1,000+ Per Month.

Tiller Money has a couple of templates for business owners that want to track their cash flow and manage quarterly estimated taxes. All of your spending and income will be synced in these spreadsheets and automates reports.

Related: How to Handle Taxes for Your Side Hustle

While Tiller doesn’t come with investment insights like Personal Capital has, you can add a GoogleFinance formula to your spreadsheets using Tiller.

The GoogleFinance formula feeds nearly live stock price data into your spreadsheet (there is a 20-minute delay). You can also track the opening and closing prices, weekly highs and lows, average daily volume, market cap, and more

You can even use formulas in GoogleFinance to set up your own portfolio tracker. You do need to add in each asset and how many shares you have, but the formulas will do the rest of the work for you.

I really like that Tiller gives you this option, but I still prefer Personal Capital for tracking my investments. It’s free software that you can use to plan for retirement, track your investments, see your net worth, manage your cash flow, analyze the fees on your funds, and more.

You can learn more about Personal Capital’s robust investment features at Personal Capital Review: Free Investment Tracking and Net Worth Tool. And if you sign up for Personal Capital using my exclusive M$M link, we’ll both get $20.

Tiller is now available for Excel in beta mode. It comes with the Tiller Money Tracker that lets you track your spending and income in an Excel workbook. You can create personalized categories and run custom reports.

You will need a free Google account to get Tiller for Excel. The Excel version works with Excel 2016 installed via an Office 365 subscription. Because it’s still in beta mode, it’s safe to assume that Tiller will eventually make more updates for Excel users.

M$M tip: If you want to learn more about Excel, check out these two articles:

• How to Make a Budget in Excel: How-To Guide and Free Templates
• Best Free Excel Budget Templates and Spreadsheets

Short answer: no. However, some users in the Tiller Money Community have talked about using Glide to create an app that works with Tiller. You can read more about that here.

Remember, Tiller Money runs through Google Sheets, and you can download the Google Sheets app and use it on your phone. You can edit transactions on your phone, but it’s going to be a lot easier if you do it from your computer’s browser window.