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Welcome
If you've landed on this sheet, chances are you're tired of the guessing game. Tired of staring at your bank balance and wondering where the money actually went. Tired of that quiet hum of anxiety that follows you through every freelance month.

I've been there too. This spreadsheet exists because of how badly I needed it during my first famine in 2020.

This is the first of two practical tools I share with Famine-Proof Freelancer readers. It maps to the F in FOCUS, which stands for Figure out your cash flow. Visibility comes before strategy, always. You can't plan around patterns you can't see.

What's inside

You'll find three sheets that work together to give you a complete picture of your money:

Money In captures every payment that lands in your account, from client invoices to refunds

Fixed Costs holds the expenses that show up every month, things like rent, software subscriptions, and internet

Variable Costs is everything else, from groceries to the new headphones you finally caved on

Before you start

This isn't a budgeting tool. It's a noticing tool. The point isn't to judge yourself for the third coffee of the week or the subscription you forgot about. The point is to finally see what's actually happening, so you can make decisions from data instead of vague dread.

Spend five minutes a day entering the previous day's transactions. Not at week-end, you'll forget things. The daily habit is gentler than it sounds, and it becomes muscle memory faster than you'd expect.

At the end of your first week, sit with three questions. What surprised me? What pattern is starting to show up? If next month looked like this week multiplied by four, would I be okay?

That's the entire exercise. No spreadsheet wizardry, no fancy formulas. Just you, getting honest with your money, possibly for the first time.

If you want the full context behind this tool, the original edition lives at shilalekh.substack.com. Once you've spent a week here, the rest of the framework will land much harder.

Start small. Be honest. Trust the process.
— Shweta
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