Easiest Budget Ever: Take Two

May 23rd, 2008

I didn’t always have a budget. In fact, there was a point in time where I didn’t need one. In college, I had one monthly bill and one per semester bill. I didn’t have time to go out and didn’t have the room to store things. I didn’t have time to cook or to take on expensive hobbies. Then. I graduated. I had more money, time, and interests. Basically, now I have more bills.

I have went through tons and tons of different budgets. I keep them flexible but every month I end up tweaking the layout, categories, and allotment. The format I have stuck with the most is based on three categories: 1) Income, 2) Fixed Expenses, and 3) Variable Expenses.

GoogleDoc Links for Spreadsheets: Simple Budget | Expenses

Income
I break my income down into paychecks, interest, and miscellaneous. Last month I sold some things on craig’s list, received my tax return and my stimulus check. All of that extra income went into my “miscellaneous” category. Since that is not reliable and rarely planned, I never make an allotted budget for it. Paychecks, however, I can easily estimate.

Fixed Expenses
These are expenses, well bills, that have a fixed monthlyamount and do not change. It is guaranteed that you will be spending your budgeted amount for those bills and the budget vs. actual should be extremely close.

Variable Expenses
These expenses change monthly but are always relatively the same. Categories such as utilities, groceries and gas are variable. You can still allot a certain amount of your budget to them. I adjust when necessary. For example, with the increase cost of gas, I know that my budget for gas will have to increase as well; so I decreased my budget for clothes last month to even it out.

Summation
To the right, I keep a simple summation of my income, fixed and variable expenses, then simply subtract and see how much I have spent and what I have leftover. Keep in mind, I do have a savings category as a variable expense so my leftovers can be close to nothing. When that happens, I simply increase my savings budget.

I use the charts and percentages just to be able to see how much I am spending on what. For example, if I am allotting a higher percentage of my income to clothes than savings, that would be a problem.

Tracking Expenses
With online banking, credit card statements and bill pay, it is rather easy to keep track of your fixed expenses. However, variable expenses can still get lost quite easily. For the second part of my money tracking process, I have an expenses spreadhseet to keep my variable spending in order.

Spending
For each month, I break my variable spending into categories and keep track daily every time I make a purchase. I simply do this by checking my bank statement every day and making sure everything matches with my spreadsheet. Then I take the category total and keep them updated in my budget.

Bills Tracker
As mentioned above, I now have a lot more bills than I once did. With different due dates and payment methods, I started making late payments just by sending a check a day too late or forgetting to buy stamps. I eliminated that by having every single bill I send, be electronic. If the company does not offer online pay, your bank usually does. I can send a check through my bank to any company or any person anywhere. Just keep in mind, your check will be sent about five days after you initially send it. In this spreadsheet, I keep track of when everythign is due, when I need to send it out, and if it has been paid yet.

Wants
We all have wants. We all want to buy things. Things are fun. However, after buying lots and lots of fun things, I realized that I would have rather saved up to get something really fun. I made this small list and have it ordered by desire level. These are basically goals to remind myself that instead of buying that shirt, I would like to save that money for upcoming trips. This really helps to keep my spending in focus.

Using GoogleDocs
I am still new at using GoogleDocs and would love some tips. So far, I use two spreadsheets, “Simple Budget” and “Expenses” then have different worksheets within each. In the budget, I also have a yearly summation tab that just adds up my income and expenditures pure month so I can see which months I spend the most.

I love the feature “Change format with rules…” which you can get to by right-clicking on any cell. I set mine up so that if my “Actual” is under my “Budget”, the text will be formatted green; if it is higher than the text will be formatted red; if it is dead on then theh text will be black. This makes it really really really easy to see where I have exceeded my budget, so I can adjust that category in the next month.

To Each Their Own
I have tried Mint, Buxfer, and Wesabe but always come back to my spreadsheets. It is the most customizeable for me and you have to enter things in manually anyway. Plus, with googledocs, I can access the files anywhere!

GoogleDoc Links for Spreadsheets: Simple Budget | Expenses

Entry Filed under: life