How to Budget Step 7 - Create your Budget
You made it! This week your only task will be to create a first draft of your budget. Budgeting can be challenging as you try to balance your long-term goals with your short-term needs and wants. As such, I suggest creating it in two steps. This week I’ll provide guidance on creating the first draft of your budget. Next week’s post will talk about how to refine it.
Practical Steps
To create your budget, you will enter values in Column D of the Budget tab of your spreadsheet. As long as you don’t enter values in Column D of any of the “Total” rows, the formulas will automatically calculate those values.
While the spreadsheet was built to be fairly flexible, one of its weaknesses is that it is not easy to add or delete income or expense categories once you have started entering your budget amounts. So, before you get started, I suggest making a final review of the line items on the Budget tab. If you need to make changes, you can look back at last week’s post for the instructions.
If you find you need to add or delete a line after you have entered budget amounts, here’s what you’ll need to do:
Make a note of the budgeted amounts of all of the line items you’ve entered.
Add or delete the line item name according the instructions in the last week’s post.
Copy the formula from cell D110 to all of the cells into which you previously typed values. You can copy a formula by:
a. Going to cell D110.
b. Holding down the Ctrl key and hitting C.
c. Moving your cursor to cell D11.
d. Holding down the shift key and then hitting the down arrow until all of the cells into which you entered values are highlighted.
e. Holding down the Ctrl key and hitting V.
f. Re-enter the budget amounts that you noted.
If you don’t take this approach, some or all of your category names in Column A will change rows, but your budgeted amounts in Column D will stay in the same rows. You’ll end up with a mismatch between category names and budget amounts.
Budget Amounts
For each line item in your budget, you’ll need to select a budget amount. These selections will require your informed judgment. Things to consider in making your selection include:
How much you’ve recorded in each category over the past several weeks, as shown in Column B.
Any changes in your income or expenses you anticipate in the next several months.
Some of these changes might result from life changes – a new job, moving, getting a roommate, getting married, having children or the like.
Other changes might result from intentional changes in your habits – fewer meals in restaurants, hiring a cleaning service, newly carpooling, among others.
You’ll also have changes from prior expenses if you change your spending or income to better align with your financial goals.
If you’ve used the tax approximation, the amounts in Column C for Federal and State/Provincial income taxes.
The goals you set as described in my post on setting financial goals. You might want to increase one or more of your emergency savings, savings for a designated purchase (vacation, house, new car) or long-term or retirement savings.
Final Steps for This Week
Once you have completed your first draft, take a look at the value in Column D of the Grand Total row. If that value is positive, it means you have more income than expenses and additions to savings. If it is negative, your expenses and savings goals are higher than your income. In this post, I’ll talk about things you can do so the value is close to zero.
