Ultimate Savings Goal Tracker Spreadsheet Template for Google Sheets & Excel

A row per goal, each with what it costs, what you hold, what you contribute monthly, a priority, the date you want it by, a status, the percentage complete and the months remaining. Ten is the number at which a goal list stops being a list and starts being a portfolio. At three goals you can hold the trade-offs in your head; at ten you cannot, and the priority column starts doing real work - not because the sheet reorders anything by it, but because writing a priority down forces the ranking to exist.

What you actually put towards each goal, month by month, rather than what you planned to. That distinction is the difference between this and the Essentials projection. A plan says two hundred a month; a record says what happened in March, and the gap between them is the most useful thing in the workbook. Totals run both ways, so a month where everything slipped is as visible as a goal that has stalled.

Every goal on one screen with what you have, what you need, the percentage and the shortfall. It is the sheet to look at when deciding where the next spare amount goes - not because it recommends anything, but because the goals nearly finished and the goals barely started are hard to distinguish in a setup sheet full of columns.

A goal name at the top, picked from the ones on your setup sheet, and its target and balance looked up beside it. Beneath that, two grids: how long that goal takes across a range of monthly contributions against a range of annual returns, and the interest that would be earned getting there. Both grids solve for whichever goal is named above, so changing the selection re-answers the whole sheet. Where a contribution never closes the gap at that return, the cell shows a dash rather than a number - which reads as not at this pace without implying a figure. What it shows clearly is the asymmetry: raising the monthly contribution moves the timeline far more than raising the return does, especially over shorter horizons.

The balance on each goal at the end of each year, with the change in money and as a percentage. Saving is slow enough that month-to-month figures rarely feel like progress. A yearly column does - and it is also the only view that shows a goal quietly going backwards, which happens more often than anyone plans for.

Six figures. Total saved, the combined target and the overall progress across everything on the top row; how many goals are on track, what you are putting in each month in total, and when the next goal is due on the second. Overall progress is the figure that keeps a long list honest. A long list at forty percent each is a different position from half of it finished and five untouched, and only a combined figure alongside the per-goal ones tells you which you are in.