Budgeting & Finance Resources

Excel Budget

This weekly budget has been designed to make the everyday management of bills and money simple; it works on the premise that you are operating 3 accounts:

- an Everyday Account where all your income is deposited and your day-to-day spending is done from
- a Budget Account where you transfer a set amount of money to each week/month and all your regular bills are paid from
- a Savings Account to help you save for the next big item!

Click here to download the budget for Excel

Instructions:

Make sure you first save the file on your computer where you can easily find it again.

Click on the first tab (Overview), and put a figure in the dark orange box (C4 ) for your anticipated income. If it changes every week due to casual work and/or pay periods, just put in the minimum you would expect to receive (i.e. the minimum you would have to live on for any particular week).

Click on the 'Budget' tab down the bottom. This will be the most time consuming part of setting up your budget:
- Fill in the dark blue box (C4) with your tithing amount (this budget assumes you direct debit your tithe).
- Go through all your bills and fill them into the weeks you expect to pay them.  It's easiest to start with the weekly bills (eg. tithe), then monthly (eg. phone) then annual (eg. car rego & insurance)
-Once you've put in all your bills, the yellow box (F7) should give you your weekly average for the bills, and an idea of how much you need to transfer from your Everyday Account to the Bills Account to cover al those costs. Bear in mind, however, that as this is a new budget, you will most likely need to have some kind of buffer amount in the Bills Account to cover any large bills that occur early during the budget period.  Once the budget has been in operation for a while the weekly amount will be sufficient so no bill becomes unexpected or unpayable!

Click on the 'Everyday' tab, and fill in the dark green boxes with your anticipated (goal) amounts for food, petrol and miscellaneous spendings.  You might not know how much you spend on these at the moment, but from what's left of your pay after the bills you might be able to come up with a goal amount to spend on each (and you'll probably change it after a couple of weeks of looking at how much you actually spend on each). Each week as you actually spend money and fill the amounts in, you will be able to see whether your goal amounts are feasible or not.

Click on the 'Savings' tab and fill in the dark yellow box (C4) with how much you want to put aside as savings each week. If you have any savings already put aside, you can put that amount in the other dark yellow box (F6) across from 'Opening'. The 'Savings Total' column will then show you how much you will accumulate if you save your goal amount each week

Now go back to the 'Overview' tab and hopefully all your figures from the other tabs have been transferred across and you can see how your income gets divided up each week! The 'Everyday Total' column at the end will show how much money is left over each week, so you could increase or decrease savings as needed and play around with different figures, but don't worry too much about it until you've spent a few weeks sorting out how much you actually spend in each section.

Click on the 'Goals' tab. You should have two pie graphs, showing how your money is divided; they will both look the same at first, but as your actual spendings change from your goals, you will see the second chart change to reflect this. It's a nice visual way to see how much money you spend on each category.

Below the pie graphs I've put in a goals sections for you to fill in so you can refer back to it and make changes or see if you're achieving your goals or not.

If  you have any problems or questions with this budget, please don't hesitate to contact me!