Starting a Budget
Download my Microsoft Excel spreadsheet BudgetOther Great Budgets to use:
- Office Excel Template-Free
- e-mail me if you have any great budgets for free use
- Microsoft Money
- Quicken
- Mvelopes
“The most challenging aspect of budgets is in the creation. Once you’ve sorted through all your spending records and entered the data into your plan, updating and maintaining are minimal tasks by comparison. Minimal, in terms of your time, not in terms of their importance. Maintaining, and updating as necessary, is essential to your budgets success! It will not tend to itself. Budgets require nurturing in order to grow with you and your overall finance plan. What good are budgets? Budgets are the foundation of financial planning. The stronger the foundation, the more secure the building. Building a strong personal finance plan is essential to your financial security and independence.”
Ok now here is what I did when I first started a planned budget. I created an Excel Spreadsheet to help me with my budget. I will create a template for this spreadsheet for those interested so they can download it.
On this spreadsheet I have 6 very important factors:
- Date/ and the detailed date such as Monday-January-27-20xx
- Receipt Description (A description of all incoming and outgoing money)
- Expected Income
- Expected Debits
- Actual Income
- Actual Debits
Be very detailed and actually plan this out for a month just to see where your money actually goes and you will be amazed where you can start cutting back and begin saving.
- I get paid every Tuesday so I think its important to put the actual day of week it is on the spreadsheet. I highlight this date because I know its payday and that’s when my fiscal week starts. Also the dates help me pay my bills on time allowing me to avoid late fees which cuts into your savings.
- It’s important to know who your giving your money to, so make sure you are writing this in. For example its nice to know how much you paid for gas per week/per month/ per year.
- I get paid every week, for some of you it might be bi-weekly or monthly. Whatever the case you have to know what your incoming money is going to be and you should have a general idea of how much.
- Most Debits you have the same due date every month such as Rent/Mortgage, Car Payment, Insurance, Cell Phone etc.
So its easy to keep track of that. Now just factor an average price for food and gas every week. - Actual Income is self-explanatory, if you receive it jot it down.
- Ditto for Debits, but just pay more attention here and see how it compares with your expected debits… You might be surprised.
Now after filling in everything I subtract all of the Expected Debits from the Expected Income. This gives me my monthly goal for savings. I also have an Actual Savings too (Actual Income - Actual Debits). Now for me for the first time seeing I could have saved around average of $800-1200 a month was mind boggling!! I haven’t saved a dime since high school when I bought my first car. To know I could have been saving that much money really got me motivated.
So for those who are interested in creating a truthful budget use this information to help you out. Like I said earlier I hope to have a template spreadsheet you can go by soon. So stay Tuned
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Comments»
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I have a pretty cool excel spreadsheet I built that I used to get out of debt. Here’s the link if anyone want’s to use it: http://www.ratestate.com/news/files/Budget%20Template.xls
It’s based on the “zero based” budgeting technique. Basically you allocate 100% of your income every pay period so you end up with zero ($0) at the bottom of the column. It was very helpful for my wife and I. (Who are now out of debt!)
thats a nice little spreadsheet mark