Subscribe Feed (RSS)Want to Succeed Financially? Use a Monthly Budget Spreadsheet
How do you manage your monthly finances? Do you know where your money is coming from and where it is going to? Budgeting your income and expenses properly is one of the keys to financial success. An essential tool to meet this goal is a reliable budgeting tool such as a monthly budget spreadsheet, which can help you set up your budget as well as monitor your income and spending. One advantage of using a spreadsheet for making your monthly budget, compared to doing it using pen and paper, is that you can easily update or modify your entries anytime while keeping them accurate. When managing your finances using a spreadsheet, all you have to do is enter the values under each category, and then you can see the total amount in just a blink of an eye.
Monthly budget spreadsheets vary in the kind of layout they use and the categories included in them. However, most spreadsheets contain the following information:
1. Income column. It lists the various sources of income such as salary, commissions, and business revenues, among others.
2. Fixed expenses column. This column is where you input your expenses that do not change on a monthly basis. Examples of fixed expenses are insurance, rent, and loan payments.
3. Variable expenses column. This is where you enter your expenses that change slightly every month. The amounts you enter are estimates of actual amounts that you allot every month. Variable expenses include food, clothing, entertainment, grocery, and utilities such as water and electricity. The variable expenses column in the monthly budget spreadsheet needs to be updated from month to month.
4. Totals column. Before getting the sum of all your monthly expenses, get the sum of each of the columns mentioned earlier. Then compute your total monthly expenses (fixed expenses plus variable expenses); you will use that value to determine your disposable income, which is the amount of money left after taking into account all your expenses. To compute your disposable income, simply deduct your total expenses from your total income. The resulting value may serve as your emergency savings fund (or you may opt to include savings as part of your fixed expenses). If your expenses are greater than your income, then you will need to adjust some categories in your variable expenses column.
Simple, isn’t it? Creating a monthly budget is made easy and hassle-free with reliable budget tools such as a monthly budget spreadsheet. You just need to use formulas to compute all your totals so that you will not need to do everything manually and avoid inaccurate calculations. Also, formulas make it easy for you to update your spreadsheet automatically whenever you add new income or expenses to the budget.
