After Christmas or holiday spending in December, January can be a rough month. Therefore, it is imperative that you plan and budget accordingly to make it to the next pay day. Creating a personal budget is one way to help keep your finances on track. You may choose to use a specific app to help, or you may rely on a more traditional spreadsheet approach.
I use an Excel workbook with a spreadsheet for the categories of savings/expenses and a spreadsheet for each month to help me manage my income and savings/expenses. First, this helps me to ensure that my planned savings/expenses do not exceed my income. Additionally, the categories help me to see exactly what I am spending on for further analysis later. This spreadsheet relies heavily on formulas to make the process of entering the necessary data as simple as possible.
Categories
The first spreadsheet in the workbook lists the categories I will need, as well as their descriptions. These can be modified, and up to 49 categories can be used here. These categories are used as a drop-down list to be inserted in the budget for the individual months.
Monthly Personal Budget
There are individual spreadsheets for each month. On the left is a list of the source of income and amount of the income. In the centre of the spreadsheet, you can list your transactions. This includes transfers to savings and expenses, the amount of these transactions, and the relevant category from the drop-down list. To the right of the spreadsheet is a list of the categories and the total amount of money budgeted for that category.
Download personal budget Excel workbook
You can download the Excel workbook with the template for a budget for the entire year below.
Leave a Reply