A budget is not a means to keep you from having fun and it isn’t even a tool to tell you where or how you have to spend your money. A budget is just a spending plan. You are just telling your money where to go ahead of time instead of waiting until you are presented with a buying decision. This puts you in control of your money instead of being jerked around by marketers and salespeople.

The best thing about budgeting is that it isn’t an exact science. If you set aside 300 dollars for groceries and find at the end of the month you haven’t used it all and would like to have an extra night of eating out, you can do that. The goal is to make sure we are not over spending not to make life miserable by shackling ourselves to the ink on a piece of paper. So lets get started.

Joe Sangl has the best budget form I have run across. In fact it isn’t even close. So lets go to his tools page and download a monthly budget form. Now that we have a framework to go from, all we do is open it in excel and start filling in the blanks. Start with income



Now type in your expenses.



The first time through just type in everything as you have been spending it. This will allow you to see the areas you are overspending and adjust accordingly. I love that this spreadsheet tells you what percentage of your income each area is consuming. The other great feature is the running total at the top. When you are done it should look something like this.



WOO HOO!! It equals zero!! That means you are done and just have to follow the plan that you have laid out. My wife and I sit down and figure out our budget out each month before the month begins. This works great for us, but a lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck (about 70% of Americans) or have irregular income, like I used to. This makes it much harder to budget on a monthly basis. Tomorrow we will look at a weekly budget form for those living paycheck to paycheck and on Thursday irregular income. If you need more help with this subject I recommend going over to Joe Sangl’s site and filling up on information. And for legal reasons I have to let you know that I am not a financial counselor and the information I share here is only how my wife and I manage or have managed our finances. I hope this inspires you to get your budget together for the new year.