A personal budgeting process
Goals
I’ve used both budgeting apps and personal spreadsheets in the past. The budgeting apps never had all the features I wanted, or had too many features I didn’t want. My previous attempts at manual expense tracking always ended up taking too much time and were too granular. With those prior experiences in mind, I had a few goals I wanted to focus on when I started building a new process around tracking my spending.
Minimal (but still manual) effort
Maybe this is a holdover habit from back when I was taught to balance a checkbook, but I still like the idea of some manual data entry in the process beyond just setting it up. I’ve found that it encourages me to have a better proactive mindset about how I’m spending money, and helps catch potential discrepancies quickly (double billing, fraudulent charges, etc).
Easy summarization and categorization
My previous attempts at budget spreadsheets had way too many individual expense categories to keep track of, and it wasn’t very easy to get an “at a glance” overview of how I was doing each month. Budgeting apps were often better at this than my own attempts, but came with other overhead and risks. For this spreadsheet, I reduced the spending categories to ten.
Carryover budgets
I’ve found it easier for me to just carry over the “unspent” or “overspent” amount from each month to the next month for all budget categories. It keeps things straightforward, and helps average out situations where some expense categories are more variable from month to month.
Process
The budgeting spreadsheet is formatted to handle a single year of expenses. The first sheet is a budget summary and a yearly overview. The other sheets are expense logs for each month of the year, with each expense categorized.
Categories
Income
- Income: primary or main income (take-home)
- Bonus Income: quarterly/yearly employment bonuses (take-home)
- Other Income: other income not accounted for as primary income
Expenses
- Auto & Transport: automobile expenses, local bus/train tickets, etc.
- Bills & Utilities: electricity, gas, phone, internet, etc.
- Entertainment: movie rentals, media purchases, etc.
- Food & Dining: groceries, restaurant takeout, etc.
- Gifts & Donations: holiday gifts, charity/donations, etc.
- Health & Personal Care: healthcare expenses, haircuts, etc.
- Household: rent, cleaning supplies, non-grocery kitchen supplies, etc.
- Shopping: any other item purchase that isn’t a household resource
- Subscriptions & Services: non-utility and non-rent recurring expenses
- Travel: airplane tickets, hotel stays, and any other travel-related purchases
Weekly data entry
Once a week, I enter all expenses manually, gathered from credit cards and direct deposits/withdrawals. The spreadsheet does the rest of the math, and provides me with a good overview of where my finances are at.
Implementation
My spreadsheet was originally based on this LibreOffice Calc template. I’ve implemented mine in Google Sheets. If you’d like to use or modify it yourself, you can copy the spreadsheet template.