If you need something to help you save money or just organize your finances, you definitely should know more about the concept of a budget worksheet: this tool is an essential one to visualize, organize and keep track of your personal finances.
Using a budget worksheet, managing your money and making plans for the future becomes a lot easier than it is without one of these sheets. By the way, making one is easier than you think.
Let’s take a look at how to make a budget worksheet and start to manage your money as soon as you can!
What is a budget worksheet?
Budget worksheets are a financial tool used by people who want to write down their finances to keep track of it, thus having more control of their financial life.
To people who are starting to keep track of the finances, having a budget worksheet can offer an introduction of the finances and help them to elaborate the budget, cut costs and save money.
Usually, this kind of worksheet has a standard model: it contains income, spends, description of these spends and dates of it.
Why should I have a budget worksheet?
Basically, to have control of your financial life. Having a budget worksheet is the first step to start to organize your finances, know how to pay your debts, see where you can cut costs, save money and stop wasting money that you don’t have — the origin of debts, which makes anyone enter into the vicious circle of debts and loans.
So, the budget worksheet is directly related to financial sustainability: with this tool, you will not need to worry or have headaches due to financial problems, since you will know everything about your money.Â
How to make a budget worksheet?
You have two ways to start a budget worksheet: a virtual worksheet, made on Excel, or a manual worksheet, in a planner, notebook or any other place that you could write and keep registers.
You will also need to decide if this worksheet represents the budget of the week, month, bimester or other period of time.
Besides this, the information that needs to be written in the worksheet are basically the same: your income, extra earnings and your spending. Descriptions and dates of these are important too: in that way, you will know what you’re spending money on.
Organize this informations in columns: the first one with the description and value of your income, the second one with your extra earnings — since they can change during the months, it is important to not put it along with your income, since you need to know exactly what are the money that you can always count on and what are the money that you can count on just sometimes.
Lastly, in the third column, allocate your spending. You can classify: fixed expenses, like food, transport, health care and education — the costs that you have every month, even if it’s value is different —, variable expenses — the ones that you can have in a period of time, like vacation, shows or other kinds of entertainment —, and, finally, extra expenses — if you car needed to be fixed, it is an extra expense, for example.
You can also add a column describing your savings so you can achieve goals, like going on a trip or buying something that you really want.
The most important thing about having a budget worksheet is to remember to keep it updated; then take some time everyday or every week to write what you spent or what you earn.
