Microsoft Excel for household budgeting
Category : Excel
Microsoft Excel can be a great tool for working out a budget for your household costs, and keeping track of them each month too.
Having a handle on your monthly income and both your essential expenditure and those little treats can be imperative to ensuring you can save for a nice holiday or buying a big item like a house or car and that you don’t end up with mounting debts and struggling with repayments.
If you find you are close to the wire each month, then tracking expenditure can also help with identifying where maybe you can make small cuts to the non-essentials and save that little bit more towards your goal.
Mortgage applications often need full details of your monthly income and expenditure so the lender can ascertain whether you can afford the mortgage repayments.
There are many different ways you can set out your budget worksheet and make it fit with how you like to work, but here are a few ideas as to how I plan out mine.
Budgeting
Income
If you are working, with a PAYE job monthly salary income can be straight forward as it is usually the same each month give or take some minor tweaks. It can be a bit more tricky if you are paid weekly based on hours worked, or if you are self-employed and work is dependent on demand.
Whichever your scenario though you should still be able to roughly figure out your monthly income that comes from wages.
Then you can also take into account other types of income that you have, for example bank account interest (although given recent interest rate cuts this can be minimal!), property rental income, benefit or child support receipts, cashback from bank accounts or credit cards etc.
You can then set up a section of your Excel worksheet that itemises “Income”, totalling it at the bottom so you can see your overall income.
Expenditure
I like to break down my expenditure into the essentials and non-essentials, as by identifying the expenses I HAVE to pay out it gives me how much I therefore then have to play with for the fun stuff.
Essentials are;
You can then add these in the two groups to another section of your worksheet for “Expenditure” and subtotal the groupings as well as the overall total.I then choose to have a car so need fuel, insurance and breakdown cover, and I have gym membership, National Trust membership and use a credit card so I need to make sure I budget for paying that back as well.
Residual Income calculation
Noting down the monthly costs, I can then work out my residual income where I can see whether I can afford those optional extras, or if there is some money remaining after paying those that I can save for a rainy day or splash out on some new clothes and nights out.
This can be a very simple calculation as shown below;
Future planning
If you know you have particular months where other costs hit your accounts i.e. Christmas and birthdays or if you are expecting more income eg. work bonus, it can help to set out a worksheet with a crosstab, with months along the top and income and expenditure items broken down in the rows. You can then get an idea of future available cash as the months go by. Below is an example of how this might look;
Top tip: Use Excel Autofill as a quick way to populate the months along the top
So that’s it. Obviously there are many ways you can set out your budget sheet, and even have a tab for each person in your household and put in some conditional formatting, the choice is yours.
Hope this helps and Happy Budgeting!