Most people desire to get a handle on their personal finances, but don’t get past the first steps because they are, in a sense, paralyzed by the thought of all the steps required to accomplish their goals.
It can be overwhelming to think about the grandeur of huge financial goals like paying down debt, building up savings, establishing an emergency fund, saving for a child’s college education, or investing for retirement. But if you are starting from a state of complete ignorance about your personal finances, the first step to accomplishing any of those is evaluating current income and spending levels.
Free Sample Excel Budget Template – Monthly Expenses Spreadsheet Shortcut
To partially alleviate the intimidation factor for large financial goals, you should look for shortcuts. Look for any reasonable method of shortcutting the painful portions of financial planning. Mostly, just try to leverage the hard work and knowledge of others to your advantage.
If you’re familiar with Excel, a pre-populated monthly expenses spreadsheet is an easy shortcut to consider for the budget evaluation step. There are hundreds of useful Excel budget templates available for download online. In this article, we will examine one specific free sample budget template, and you will find links to several other Excel budgeting worksheet reviews.
Excel Worksheet Example – Budget Template Pre-Populated with List of Expenses
The Christian Personal Finance blog is a unique financial resource about banking, budgeting, debt elimination, insurance, investing, making money, and saving money from a biblical perspective. On this site, you’ll find a handy list of ten free Excel income and expenses worksheets for download. The one called “Personal Budgeting Spreadsheet” is a nice worksheet appropriate for one- or two-earner households.
You can use this tracking spreadsheet to capture daily expenses and record notes on monthly budgeting tabs. The spreadsheet author has thoughtfully included a master tab that you can customize with your household’s particular mix of monthly fixed and variable expenses and budgeted amounts; a starter list of monthly household expenses has already been pre-populated. Those expenses then feed into every monthly tab for daily or weekly use. Because those functions are separated, this robust spreadsheet is easy to customize.
Other Easy-to-Use Income and Expenses Worksheets – Microsoft Excel Downloads
The article Sample Monthly Expense Spreadsheet reviews one of the most popular Microsoft Excel budget spreadsheets available for free download on Microsoft.com. Here you’ll find a direct link to the sample budget template as well as guidance for realistically projecting monthly income and expenses using historical data.
If you're using an older version of Microsoft Office, you likely can’t go wrong with the worksheet profiled in the article Free Microsoft Excel Personal Budget Spreadsheet. That template is compatible with Excel 97 and later versions.
Customizing Your List of Monthly Household Expenses
After you find an Excel budgeting worksheet to suit your needs, you will need to customize it with your own income and expense categories. Income is usually pretty simple, as that typically comes from a few sources at most. Coming up with a comprehensive list of expenses is a little trickier. Here is a list of common household expenses to get you started.
Need examples of percentages to allocate to each household budget category? You’ll find a suggested breakdown in the article Basic Monthly Budget – Household Expenses List.
TLE101
Lena Gott - Lena Gott is a Certified Public Accountant who gives practical financial advice to her readers.
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