Sinking Funds Tracker

One row per fund

Each fund gets a name, a target, a monthly contribution column, a saved-so-far column, and a bar of ten segments to shade in as you go. A totals row runs along the foot.

The starting list is editable and deliberately ordinary — car repairs and MOT, Christmas, holiday, home maintenance, annual insurance, birthdays. Currency switches: pounds, dollars, euros.

What a sinking fund is

Money saved gradually for an expense you already know is coming.

The MOT is not an emergency. Christmas is not a surprise. The car insurance renews on the same date it renewed last year. Yet these are the bills that go on credit cards, because a £600 expense arriving in one month is painful while £50 a month for a year is not — and the only difference between those two situations is whether somebody wrote it down twelve months earlier.

Why it is not an emergency fund

An emergency fund covers what you cannot predict: a boiler, a job loss, a broken phone. It sits untouched and it is one pot.

Sinking funds cover what you can predict, and they are many small pots that are actively spent. Keeping them separate is what stops the emergency fund from being quietly drained by Christmas every year, which is the single most common way an emergency fund fails.

Filling it in

List the irregular expenses of a year first — look back through twelve months of statements, because you will forget three of them from memory. Put a realistic target against each. Divide by the number of months until it is needed, and that is the monthly contribution.

Then check the totals row. If the monthly total is more than you can actually save, the fix is to lower targets or lengthen timescales now, on paper, rather than to discover it in August.

The bar

Ten segments, so each one is a tenth of the target. Shade one in as you cross each threshold.

This is doing something the numbers alone do not. A column reading £240 of £600 is information; six rows of part-shaded bars is a picture of where the year stands, and the row that has not moved for three months is visible at a glance.

Where the money lives

The sheet tracks; it does not hold. Many people keep one savings account with the funds tracked on paper, which is simplest. Others use a bank that offers separate pots or spaces, which makes the separation real and removes the temptation.

Either works. What does not work is keeping it in your head, which is the situation this page exists to end.