Learning to Budget

A key part of life is learning how to manage your own money and budget to fit your needs. Throughout university and also my placement year – I was a little bit lax on fully budgeting because my rent was termly rather than monthly and it included my bills too and I was always comfortable with my part time jobs.

Now with my new job and moving down south (which is y’know – a lot more expensive!) – I decided to work on my budgeting skills and create my own spreadsheet. I’ve been using it for a couple of months now – and it helps me to understand where my money is going each month. It also helps me manage my different accounts, and whether I can add to my savings or not!

Skip Straight to the Downloadable Spreadsheet

Why should you Budget?

• You know how much money you have to spend each month
• You can plan ahead for the expenses you definitely need to pay (rent, bills, gifts for family… etc)
• Can enjoy yourself without feeling guilty about spending… because you know you have the money to spend!
• Can put aside money to save for the bigger things in life
• Can cut down your non-vital expenses (You never realise how much money you actually spend per month on coffee…

Creating a Spreadsheet

I’d looked around online a lot – but many of the spreadsheets I found didn’t quite fit what I needed. I wanted to have an easy overview of how much money I had – but also to track how much income and expenses I had each month and year. Plus, since I have multiple accounts – I needed each of them to be incorporated into my tracker.

Love a spreadsheet but hate having to make one? No problem! I’ve made a free budget spreadsheet for you, which you can see here. You can save to your own drive or download and use! Plus here’s some more detail on how to use it.

Overview

The overview page is one that you never have to edit except for your ‘starting balance’ in J3-J9. Once you start populating the monthly sheets, the information should be pulled through to show you:

1. How much you have in each account
2. Your monthly expenses
3. Your monthly income

This can help you see if you’re spending more than you get in a month really easily. Knowing how much you have in each account is really easy too – and if you want to change the names of your accounts, you should do it on this page.

Yearly Breakdown

If you want a more detailed breakdown of what your income and expenses – you can look at your Yearly Breakdown page. Again – you don’t need to edit this page at all unless you want to add a category or type to your budget.

If you need to add a category or type – use the insert row feature and the monthly sheets should add them to the drop downs. Although – you can also change the names of the ones currently there. Use the expenses graph to see quickly where your money goes each month.

Accounts

If you’re like me and you have different accounts then this is a great sheet for you! Similarly to the Yearly Breakdown this page pulls through everything from the monthly sheets so you only need to edit the account names. You can also use the delete row or insert row functions to remove or create accounts if you use less or more.

Alternatively – if you’re a one account kind of person, you can delete this sheet.

I like having a separate account for my blogging income because it allows me to better budget by blogging expenses like domain name registrations and designs. For example, this year – I already had money in that account ready to pay for my yearly registration.

Monthly Sheets

For each month you should fill in all your income and outgoings for each individual account (this includes if you move money between accounts – remember to add both the income to one account and expense for the other!).

These pages aren’t particularly ‘pretty’ and can get quite messy if you’re adding a lot in for each of the accounts – but that’s why the overview pages work for better understanding!

Keep an eye on these pages if your front pages aren’t matching what you accounts say – it may be that you’ve put in a payment twice, or forgotten about one completely!

Use the Downloadable Spreadsheet

Altering to Fit Your Needs

You can also edit this sheet to better fit your needs! Change the names of or add accounts to fit what you currently have. I have my ‘Work’ account for blogging and freelance copywriting work – but for some this may be a useless account. I also have two types of savings and a credit card, which may not be applicable to everyone.

Alter, add or remove the category or types of income and expenses to best meet your lifestyle. Maybe you have a hobby which costs more money and needs its own section in your budget! Either way, choose what you want to know about most when budgeting.

If you have savings goals – you can also add these to the Overview page to see how close you are and whether it improves each month.