Sharing my Budget Spreadsheet

Alright people! I have been promising my Excel Spreadsheet so here it is.  Trust me, the delay was only in my lack of knowledge with html coding.....but I got I figured it out!

If you have not read my previous posts and you are new to this blog, I encourage you to do so before moving forward. Here are some previous posts that will help you catch up.

Budgeting. Learning from our past, before we move forward.

Drafting your Budget

Now that we have looked back, and thought about our goals for the future, lets build us a budgeting spreadsheet that we will use to track our finances and help us really see where our money is going each month!


I have attached a copy of my spreadsheet for you to download. Please let me know if the link doesn't work.

Blank Budget


If you cant get it to open it should look something like the this....

BUDGET COLUMN -  go in and manually input your ideal budget amount each month. What you hope to earn in income should be positive (0.00) and what you hope to spend in expenses should be negative (-0.00)

ACTUAL COLUMN - At a time you decide on, pull all your account statements (credit cards, bank accounts) and go one at a time through your transactions and input them in the category you deem most appropriate.  Remember income should be put in as a positive number (0.00) and expenses should be a negative number (-0.00) I do this on the 1st and 15th of each month.

MULTIPLE ENTRIES - If you have more than one transaction in a category in a given month you will need to make sure you enter them as follows.  i.e. you go to Macy's 3 times and you see on your credit card a charge for $59, $62, and $12 and it was all for clothing.  You will need to input in the clothing category = -59 + -62+ -12

VARIANCE - This column will automatically update for you as you fill in the budget and actual column.  Also, it will automatically roll over from month to month so you never have to do a thing!  You will always know how much over or under you are in each category from month to month.

I know their are a lot of free online tools that you could jump right into at this point. If you feel confident and want to use those instead, go ahead. However, I would like to encourage everyone to start with an ole fashion Excel Spreadsheet like I did.  It will be a little more work in the beginning, but it will force you to be truly aware of where you money is going. Half the battle of budgeting isn't about how much you are spending, but acknowledging how much you are spending and realizing the  truth about your spending habits.  Doing it the ole fashion way will force you to really look at each transaction and see bit by bit where your money is going. Try this for the first 6 months and then if you want to break away to another tool, feel free....