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Do you want to set up a budget for where to spend your money going forward?
It is a link to a Google Drive document, which you can download to your computer or save to your Drive folder — where you can access it whenever you have an internet connection.
Enter the monthly amount spent for each family member on every item. If the expense is not an individual amount, but an expense for the entire family (for example: your mortgage or rent), enter that number into the “Shared” column.
Annual Expenses are expenses that happen less frequently than every month. We have an “Annual Expenses” category, for items we save for over the course of a year by depositing money into a savings account each month. Thus, the “Total” is the amount of our monthly deposit. We set up our checking account to automatically deposit this amount into a savings account on the 5th of each month.
We also have items that we spend on throughout the year but do not set up an automatic savings deposit to pay for them. A good example of those expenses are gifts: We spend $50 per person per birthday and for Christmas. That comes out to $400 per year. It’s an expense that we can pay for when it arises, but it’s just easier to put it into the budget as an annual expense and let the worksheet figure out how much it costs us per month.
Those annual expenses have $0 already written into the “Shared” column — just like the items in the “Annual Expenses” category. Enter the amount your family spends, per person, every year on that item.
For example, if you pay a life insurance premium every year in August, enter the amount of the premium. The “Shared” column will add up all the life insurance premiums paid annually. The “Subtotal” column will divide that “Shared” amount by 12, which gives you the amount you should set aside every month for that annual expense.
What if you have an annual expense that’s shared, and not paid per individual? Just enter a number into the “Shared” column and it will overwrite the formula in that cell. The Subtotal will still divide the “Shared” number by 12 and give you a monthly amount. For example, you may spend $1,000 per year on travel and $3,000 per year on home repairs and maintenance. Enter those amounts in the “Shared” column and the “Subtotal” will calculate $83.33 and $250 per month expenses.
Not all families do this, and that’s fine.
We each have a monthly allowance, so to speak, to spend on whatever we want — no questions asked. For us, that means that my trips to Dunkin Donuts come out of my allowance and my husband’s gadget purchases come out of his allowance. We each have different spending priorities personally, so this is a great example of “fair is not always equal” (as my sister says). Just because I want to spend $15 a month on Dunkin Donuts doesn’t mean that my husband should have a $15 per month D&D budget. He wouldn’t use it.
Enter your net income. That is, the amount of money that gets deposited in the bank.
The “net” is the money you have to work with in your budget — and the reason why this budget doesn’t include health insurance expenses. Health insurance is typically an expense that comes right out of someone’s paycheck. If it doesn’t, then you will want to add it to one of the expense items.
Are your incomes paid every two weeks? Then you’re all set. This worksheet will calculate how much you have each month.
Are your incomes paid twice a month? Then you will need to change the formula a little bit.
Change the formula from
=((B61+C61+D61+F61)*26)/12
to
=(B61+C61+D61+F61)*2
Here is what that looks like in the Budget Worksheet:
The formula if you get paid once a month: =(B61+C61+D61+F61)
As always, if you have any questions about how to use this form, please ask it in the comments and I will be happy to answer it. By keeping questions to the comments, it will help others if they have the same questions.
If the online booking system is not working for you, please call 781-499-2016 and we can set something up.