How to Track Your Path to FI in 2026 (Step-by-Step Guide)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: personal financial statement, Bigger Pockets Money, 31-day DIY personal finance challenge, Mindy Jensen
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Bigger Pockets Money, personal financial statement
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Bigger Pockets Money, personal financial statement
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Bigger Pockets Money, Monarch Money, personal financial statement
5. 20:00 – 21:47: personal financial statement, Scott Trench

Notable quotes from "How to Track Your Path to FI in 2026 (Step-by-Step Guide)"

• Goals? Most people set goals without really knowing where they stand. Today we are building a personal financial statement. Your complete financial snapshot. Net worth, cash…

  about personal financial statement · at 0:02

• At any time on the website. And we specifically invite you to join our 31-day DIY personal finance challenge which Mindy drove and created. here I made this particular spreadsheet.

  about 31-day DIY personal finance challenge · at 1:11

• Not a substitute for the software that Mindy and I use. We are actually we are big fans of monarch.com, Monarch Money.

  about Monarch Money · at 19:01

• That, wraps, up, this, episode, of, the BiggerpocketsMoney podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Indie Jensen saying stay bright.

  about Scott Trench · at 21:38

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Mindy Jensen — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:28
  Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my spreadsheet nerd co-host Scott Tred.
• Scott Trench — Person · 1 mention · first at 21:39

Companies & orgs

• Bigger Pockets Money — Company · 12 mentions · first at 0:26
  Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my spreadsheet nerd co-host Scott Tred.
• Monarch Money — Company · 2 mentions · first at 19:06

Concepts & topics

• personal financial statement — Concept · 13 mentions · first at 0:06
• 31-day DIY personal finance challenge — Concept · 1 mention · first at 1:15

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Do you want to crush your 2026 money goals? Most people set goals without really knowing where they stand. Today we are building a personal financial statement. Your complete financial snapshot. Net worth, cash flow, assets liabilities, everything, all in one place. Let's make 2026 your best financial year yet. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my spreadsheet nerd co-host Scott Tred.

0:33 Mindy, opening, this, show, with, a statement. See what I did there? Yeah. Um well anyways, as we look into the new year, that's when we start to think about our goals for next year. And today we're going to share one of the resources that we've created here at biggerpocketsmoney.com. This can be found and downloaded for free at biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources where we'll be uploading a large number of files over the next year. So just remember that one.pocketsmoney.com/resources. is, we're, going to, upload, a, bunch, of, free stuff there. You don't need to give us your email address to download these.

1:00 These are just free. We made it intentionally free without requiring an email address because we want these in the hands of more people just to help as many people as possible. But you are of course welcome to join our email list uh at any time on the website. And we specifically invite you to join our 31-day DIY personal finance challenge which Mindy drove and created. Um, here I I made this particular spreadsheet. Uh, but Mindy has driven that 31-day financial planning challenge. It's awesome. I have not completed all of it.

1:28 I look forward to it because it's going to make me better with my money and I'm supposed to be good at it and host this podcast with her. Scott, I want to say that day one of the 31-day challenge is to fill out your personal financial statement. So, if you have already signed up for the challenge, this day is going to be a doozy. However, this is the foundation for the entire challenge. So, it's really important that you have all of your numbers all in one spot that you can keep coming back to. If you are signed up for the 31-day challenge, you can get a head start by going to biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources and downloading the personal financial statement so that you can put all of your numbers in place and then you really only have one tiny task on that first day.

2:12 Well,, should, we, talk, about, personal financial statements? Yeah, Scott, what kind of information are we asking our listeners to put into this document?

2:21 Yeah,, so, a, personal, financial, statement is just a snapshot of where you're at at any given time, right? It should list out your a balance sheet, assets, and liabilities. Um, that should include everything on your balance sheet. Everything you own that is valuable um or that could be considered part of your net worth should be included on this. And then it should include your income and expenses. I believe that a good personal financial statement should also include, other, assets, or, at least, have, a placeholder for them like for example pensions or things that are not as easy to articulate as part of a financial plan perhaps social security if you wanted to include that. Those are factors that are important in financial planning. So this is not a projection model. It's not something that's going to say you're starting here and you're going to end up here. It's just a snapshot of where you are so you can

3:06 diagnose., And, one, of the, things, that, I find frustrating about this is there's not a lot of great resources out there that I can find that are free. And so this should not be a complex exercise. This is not a very technical thing. This is a very basic building block of personal finance. And so I just wanted to put a free spreadsheet together. You can download this in Microsoft Excel format or you can open it in Google Sheets. You can we'll take you to a link to a place where you can make a copy of it and put your numbers in there. Nobody has to see this except you, but it probably is a good idea if you're gonna for example, meet with the financial planner or begin talking serious about your numbers that you fill something like this out that provides a starting point for the discussion where some, you know, um, financial information can be looked at.

3:48 So,, Scott,, you, said, this, is, a, simple spreadsheet and I want to say it's simple, but it's comprehensive. It's not difficult to fill this out, but it is going to take time and it will require you to find all of your financial numbers in order to get a whole snapshot. So, I I don't want people to think, "Oh, I'm just going to put in a couple of things and it's going to be done." It's a good document. It's a great document. And how much does it cost again, Scott?

4:13 Uh,, $0., That's, free, for, for, everyone regardless whether you you are a listener of Bigger Pockets Money or or if you are signed up for the Bigger Pockets Money newsletter list. All right, Scott, let's jump into the personal financial statement.

4:27 Sure., So,, we're, going, to, go, to biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources. We're, going to, go, to, the, resource library, and, then, we're, going to, go, and download the personal financial statement. We can open it in Drive or download it. We're going to download it here. Thank you to the 200 people who have already downloaded this before we've talked about it. Uh, so that's great. Thank you to to those folks. So let's open it up now. And we're going to be greeted with an instructions tab here. And this is just going to give you a quick overview about how to use the document. It's designed to be as simple as possible to get a reasonable picture of a typical Bigger Pockets money listeners financial position. I didn't build while I hope anyone and everyone will find this resource if they need it or could use it. This is not like something for somebody who's worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, exe

5:10 a huge a huge business owner, anything like that. And it's a little bit more complicated perhaps than somebody who's broke and just getting started, maybe just has a few debts and no investment accounts, will, need., This, is, a, little bit more complex than that. The idea is to modify all the inputs here. I've plugged in a a position that I think is typical of an early retiree. So, someone at the end of their financial journey here at Bigger Pockets Money, just to give a sense for where all these inputs can go on each of the tabs here. So, you fill these out and then I have a little kind of nifty feature where if you want to print it, it's all ready to go as long as you just exclude that first page.

5:42 It's all formatted and stuff nicely to to send to your your financial planner. Okay. So, let's talk about assets and liabilities. And this is the first reason why I was having trouble with a personal financial statement online. I feel like most personal financial statement templates do not discriminate between different types of net worth. Right? When we are looking to achieve financial independence, we want to treat our primary residence, our cars, our personal property and beneficiary accounts like a 529 or a donor advised fund differently than our stock bond portfolio or rental properties. Right?

6:16 It's so basic and obvious and yet this does not exist in an easy format, a simple format that I can find online in a robust way. And so that's all this is doing. You just plug in your primary residence, your mortgage, your vehicles your personal property, and that's associated with them. And that's how you get your personal property and other assets. Then we talk about your financial portfolio where you plug in your cash, your traditional or Roth or other retirement accounts, your after tax position, and you get an idea of your net liquid financial portfolio. I call your financial I I separated the financial portfolio into two buckets here. Um the liquid financial portfolio which you can think of as traditional stocks and bonds. Many people just live in that world in terms of investing their whole lives and that's great. And then many other bigger pockets money listeners for example will have other

7:04 types of investments in their position. for example, like rental properties or businesses that they own or private equity investments or credit or debt funds or those types of things that are less common but still included in various parts of the portfolio. And I also have this concept of other cash flow, right? Like that that might include pensions or social security or these things that don't fit on a balance sheet but are there, you know, we're going to put a small nominal dollar amount to so that we can actually discuss them and have them and have them uh uh be a part of our our our our portfolio. And there's a place to show where that cash flow is coming in on our net worth and liability statement. So this does not actually sum up to your illquid financial portfolio. Here it is just a showing what the cash flow projections are going to come from from your after your your illquid investment

7:50 portfolio. Scott,, I, want, to, point, out, that, because you have very helpfully prepopulated all of these numbers. If somebody is going to fill this in and an item doesn't fit in like let's say my instance crypto. I don't have anything in crypto. Make sure you mark these as zero. Otherwise, it's going to change the numbers in a not positive way for you.

8:13 Well,, there's, places, to, add, all, of, that stuff right? Right., No,, I'm, saying, you, have, already populated all of this information. So if I say, "Oh, crypto doesn't apply to me." And then I just skip it instead of taking that 57,000 and turning it to a zero. I think it's really helpful to have all of these numbers prepopulated. But then also make sure you take out the anything that doesn't apply.

8:31 100%., Yeah., And, by, the, way,, o, over, time, Mindy and I plan to invent fake people for example, like Barb, broke at 50 retired at 60, and we will prepopulate versions of this and iterate on them so that they're more practically applicable to that type of person. And so that would be one that in the future you could download at biggerpocketmoney.com/dresources as we populate those to kind of give a view of of of a certain person's specific situation. And maybe those inputs will be will save you some time because they'll be closer to your situation than this on the cusp of retirement bigger pockets money listener that we created here. The other core component of a personal financial statement is your income and expenses.

9:09 So this is going to include this this has fields for you know if imagine a married couple with two jobs they have a base and a bonus component. Maybe there's a 1099 here or there where they make some some sort of side income. Maybe there's, you know, a little bit of other income in some category, a rental property, and some investment income. And the idea here was to get all the reasonable sources for investment income or income in a household that is typical to the Bigger Pockets money listener set. Obviously, someone with more complex streams of income or different streams of income will have a different view in this and we should build a different type of personal financial statement or have them modify components of this. But if your position is fairly normal and includes generally speaking these types of income streams, I also put in a little handy tax liability calculator. One of the problems we've

9:55 been having over the years at Bigger Pockets Money here is that the what is your savings rate question seems to stump a lot of people because it's like well, I max out my 401k and I get my 401k match and how does that factor into my savings rate? That's pre-tax versus post tax. Well, it's all dollars you save less all dollars you spend is your savings rate, whether they're pre-tax or post tax. And so, this will help you kind of understand that savings rate about what is your net income, how much do you spend, and how much cash are you accumulating per year net of taxes? And there's a circularity to this because if you were to, for example, not contribute to your 401k, you will pay more taxes which will reduce your overall savings rate. And so, figuring out that circularity, I think, is really important. and planning out the journey to financial independence and seeing how big of a propellant these tax advantage

10:45 accounts can be is I think really powerful. So, little handy tax calculator. This is all for 2025. I will update this for 2026 as we pass into the new year here with new tax tables um for all that kind of stuff. So, how am I doing here on the income side? Mindy any questions about this part?

10:59 I, think, it's, pretty, straightforward. Again, just if it doesn't apply to you remove the number that is pre-populated.

11:04 Awesome., And, then, on, the, expense, side,, I mean,, very, basic., This, this this, is, not something that personal financial statements really ever have a challenge with. You can go anywhere on the internet and download a very simple personal financial statement that'll help you do a budget. Right? So, this is there's no there's nothing new here. I didn't attempt to be particularly interesting or unique or new with my budgeting here. I just put in some basic basic assumptions for household spending here and plugged them in in the most common categories here. So, if you're looking for a more robust budgeting tool, for example, this is not it. We're using this as an illustration of one's annual or monthly household spending in the context of of really a deeper look at tax planning and where my assets are.

11:43 How much do I really have in my financial portfolio? All, right,, Scott,, what's, the, next, tab?

11:47 Okay,, next, up,, um, I, have, three, tabs, here that are optional schedules here for for folks that have more complex situations. In some cases, we find that individuals will have a large number of debts. This is probably less common among Bigger Pockets Money listeners, but it's fairly common among some of the more complex Finance Friday applicants that we've gotten. And for that, in order to determine a strategy to pay off debt, we need to know what your balance on each debt is, what the interest rate is, what the payment is, and in some edge cases we need to know the age of that debt. If you, have a, lot, of, very, old, debt,, that can change the strategy a little bit in terms of whether to start paying it off now or let it age out of certain statutes. That's what this tab is for.

12:29 It's just basic input fields and it's useful for us here at Bigger Pockets Money as we look to think about certain specific planning situations. Next up is the real estate tab. So, this is not a robust software tab. It's just, hey Mindy and I have talked to a lot of people here at Bigger Pockets Money who have rental properties, right? of course, where, you know, with Bigger Pockets and and the experience we have there,, there's, there's, going to, be, an overlap. And so, this is just a place to type in basic information about a rental property that I would need at at a basic level to begin the discussion about what ought you to do with a with this rental property portfolio. Right? Looking at these numbers and having a discussion with somebody, I can begin to get a better picture of something and maybe begin to make some highle recommendations. This is what I would want as a very first glance, very high

13:13 level overview, the minimum amount of information to begin thinking about those types of things. So, should I go ahead Mindy?

13:18 I, really, like, the, two, columns, all, the way to the right here. The annoyance factor and the prospects because right now this property might be awesome or might be awful, but you know that it's going to get better or you you really have a good idea that it's going to get worse for factors that are specific to that property. What's the number one rule of uh real estate, Scott? Location location, location. So having this in there can help you again get a holistic picture of your rental properties if that applies to you. And again, these are all optional. So if it doesn't, just skip on to the next one.

13:52 Just, to, quickly, go, through, this,, right? This has basic information around the address of the property. What is it? Is it, a, duplex?, Is, it, a, triplex?, Is, it a single family home? What does it look like? The value of the property, the mortgage balance that is remaining as of today, the equity in the property. That's just a calculation of course what its rent is or could be in the immediate future. The mortgage payment estimate for expenses on that property that are non-mortgage. So think capex, vacancy management, utilities, all that kind of stuff. And then the estimated cash flow which is an output or a calculation from that. And this tells me very basically how's this property performing from a cash flow perspective. The next two pieces of information that I need that I can't really find anywhere. There's no project there's no software that that make this really easy is just like is

14:33 this property a real pain in your your rear? like do you want to keep this thing like you know and and if if it is do you believe in it in the future like are you hanging on to this pain in the rear property because you have super high you know optimism in the future and I can just tell with a simple one to three crude scale yes this property is super easy and has high potential great now I understand why I'm looking at a negatively cash flow property in your personal financial statement so this is what I would want to see if someone was bringing to me their their position in a filled out spreadsheet form and I could I could begin to say Okay, I can make I can, at least, begin, the, discussion, here with some basic information that will help, you know, guide me in the right direction to begin providing advice and and I I would I would be surprised if some people who own a bunch of properties don't fill this out and come

15:18 to their own conclusion without having to ever talk to anybody. So, just by filling this out and saying, "Hm, this property is pretty annoying and I'm not very optimistic about it. Hm, maybe ought to, sell, that, one.", So,, I, think that that's what this is for. This sheet comes with a population of seven rows. You can do one of two things here. If you have more properties, you can either add rows or just duplicate the tab, but I presume that if you're going to be owning dozens of rental properties that you are basically competent in Excel and so I did not build it out for the mogul here uh to put their their financial position together.

15:46 Awesome., Scott,, what, is, the, last optional tab? This, is, kind, of, a, catch-all, for, other assets, right? So, I kind of have this concept of a pension that comes up and I have, you know, when will that date of that asset be realized or available? What is the estimated cash flow? What is the value of that asset? Sometimes you know a pension or social security does not have any value. You cannot sell that asset to anybody else but it does provide a stream of income. So there's an option to provide an asset value and a cash flow potential here. What is the liquidity of something? I have a simple 1 to4 scale here which is one is very liquid. Um this would be like as liquid as like a stock market investment in a in a highly traded ETF or index fund. I have kind of moderately liquid like a rental property like you could sell it in less than 12 months. I have a very long-term investment like think imagine

16:32 like something you you give uh money to a private equity fund and it's year one of the fund and it's a five-year fund at least that's a very illlquid investment that will not be realizable for a long time and four is total illquidity this is social security right you cannot sell your social security income stream to somebody else that's kind of where I have that and that gives me just a quick idea about what what this asset looks like and then last I have this confidence lever here of hey am I am I really confident in this asset right if I give my money to a private equity fund maybe I'm not that confident in it.

17:00 Maybe I'm like a two or three out of out of four in terms of my my confidence level in this thing. But if I'm in social security, maybe I'm really confident in that. Or if I'm in a in a pension fund here in Colorado, I'm very confident in that. And I'm a two or three if I'm in Chicago. Sorry guys, if you're from Chicago uh and have a pension there, I think there's a little bit, more, reason, to, be, a, little bit, more pessimistic about that. But that that's just the qualifiers there. And this tells me how you what you're expecting and how you feel. I think it's remarkable that a a large percentage of America cannot do this. They cannot tell me where what their net worth is, what their asset location is, and what they're invested in at an up-to-date snapshot. I think that the Bigger Pockets money listener population will generally be able to do that and sometimes can maybe frustratingly lack

17:43 the right format to make that easy. And this is my my first attempt at this. And again, I will modify it and update it for different personas over the the years here as we really map into people's specific situations. And the specific deep dive into a real estate investor's portfolio is, you know that's going to provide a very different snapshot into their finances. I'm going to want to emphasize different things when looking at that than I would somebody who is all in their 401k and all invested in V, for example. Right?

18:11 So, this will hopefully evolve to to emphasize the different things, but this is like my first attempt at something that could be a catch-all for most Bigger Pockets Money listeners. Just get a helpful initial glance at what their portfolio looks like. But yeah, respond in the comments here. If you can answer this question, say yes, of course, I can answer that this or no. Um, I actually can't express my personal financial statement,, my, net, worth,, at least, not, in a way that breaks out my investment portfolio from my other net worth very easily. I would love to love to hear if this is actually helpful to anybody as a quick spreadsheet. I think this will be really helpful to all of our 31day challenge members because this is like I said at the beginning, this is the day one task. So, if you want to get a jump start on your day one task, go to biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources and download the personal financial

18:56 statement and start filling it out. Awesome., I, do, want, to, call, out, um however that this this spreadsheet is not a substitute for the software that Mindy and I use. We are actually we are big fans of monarch.com, Monarch Money. uh also known as Monarch Money and we have a partnership with them where you can get 50% off of Monarch using the code pockets P O C Ks. Mindy actually walked through setting that up for the first time. I've used it for years with my wife Mindy and Carl set this up not 2 or 3 months ago. So you can you can find that video at by typing into YouTube how to set up Monarch money step by step to track your net worth spending and budget. The advantage of course with using a software like a monarch instead of a spreadsheet is that you can get a real-time snapshot of your financial position. The advantage of using a spreadsheet like this is to fill out that snapshot to send to somebody else

19:45 like your spouse or like like a uh financial planner to get a quick introduction to how you think about planning for financial independence. And so I don't think they're mutually exclus ex exclusive,, but, I, primarily, use Monarch for all realtime spending. All of my budgeting whenever I want to look at what my an updated net worth, that's all there in Monarch in the app um on on my browser on my phone. And this spreadsheet is really more of a hey, I'm thinking about having a discussion with a financial planner or thinking about you know, some highle goal setting and what I want in the next year or two.

20:16 Then I'll take a look at my this this and break out my net worth in a little bit different of a way to give me an idea of what's my FIRE portfolio look like, which no software, in my opinion does a great job of today. All right Scott, this was a lot of fun. I am super excited for the 31day challenge. I am super excited for people to just fill this personal financial statement out so they can start to get a better handle of all of their financial picture. Again that location is biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources and download the personal financial statement or sign up for the 31-day challenge. Biggerpocketsmoney.com/31day and we will send it to you on January 1st. We're going to make a lot of these over the years. We got we like this is this is fun for us. If you have a new resource, you know, some kind of some kind of tool or some kind of spreadsheet or financial plan or whatever it is, let

21:04 us know in the comments here what we can build and we'll put that into the the backlog, and, and and, and, spit, these things out. They'll all be free at biggerpocketsmoney.com/resources um for you to check out. But yeah, but let us know um what we should be building next. We thought this was a very basic first starting point for personal finance and DIY resources.

21:24 Yep., Scott, is, having, an, absolute, blast building this stuff, so please help him be an even bigger nerd. You can email Scott at biggerpocketsmoney.com or mindy at biggerpocketsmoney.com. All right Scott, should we get out of here?

21:37 Let's, do, it. That, wraps, up, this, episode, of, the BiggerpocketsMoney podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Indie Jensen saying stay bright

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "How to Track Your Path to FI in 2026 (Step-by-Step Guide)"?

In order: 0:00 personal financial statement, Bigger Pockets Money, 31-day DIY personal finance challenge, Mindy Jensen; 5:00 Bigger Pockets Money, personal financial statement; 10:00 Bigger Pockets Money, personal financial statement; 15:00 Bigger Pockets Money, Monarch Money, personal financial statement; 20:00 personal financial statement, Scott Trench.

What is mentioned in this BiggerPockets Money episode?

6 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including personal financial statement, Bigger Pockets Money, Monarch Money, Mindy Jensen, 31-day DIY personal finance challenge, Scott Trench. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How to Track Your Path to FI in 2026 (Step-by-Step Guide)"?

The episode runs 22 min; the transcript is about 4,732 words in 41 timestamped sections.

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