Our budget is fluid, flexible, and works for us. We use Google Sheets to help us keep our budget in order and with us at all times. Below you will find resources to help you start your own budget along with a tutorial on how we setup our budget. You will also find links to our budget and downloads if you prefer a different version.
When you are looking to start a budget you really want to break down your areas of concern as simply as possible. Once you have your general areas, you can begin to get more specific with each of the areas. For us, we have two general areas that we use as our starting point, income and expenses.
Our income is very set. We know what we are going to earn each month, and we can plan very far in advance because of this. If your income is not as predictable, we would recommend that you update your budget often to better track your income and try to find an average monthly income.
Our expenses, costs, are what change on a month to month basis. Some items, like our mortgage, or fixed, but others change depending on the month. To get more specific with our budget we need to examine our costs each month. To begin with, we break our expenses down into two basic sections, wants and needs.
Depending on your situation, you may need to edit your needs and wants, but we break them down into the following categories:
- Needs
- Mortgage
- Daycare
- Food
- Internet
- Phones
- Transportation
- Utilities
- Electric
- Gas
- Trash
- Water
- Wants
- Personal budgets
- Child’s budget
- Going out (restaurants)
- Miscellaneous
By keeping each of these areas in our budget, we are able to track our spending and determine if we really need something or if we want it. To complete our budget, we use Google Sheets. In the quick tutorial below you will see how we created our budget in Google Sheets and learn how to create your own. Below the video we also have links to a template that you can use to create your own budget.
Download Our Template
We have two basic templates that you can use to create your own budget. Our budget is based directly off of these templates and we have used them for years in order to control our spending, show us were our money is going, and to give us timely information about the state of our finances.
Questions?
If you need help using our template or if you have a question about budgeting in general, please contact us. We are happy to help.