Digisign Budget Proposal Template Made Easy

Digisign budget proposal template

so as we are getting ready for a new year that means we get to come up with a new budgeting system or maybe perfect an old one that you are using in this video i will be showing you a complete walkthrough tutorial of my 2021 budget spreadsheet this is the exact same spreadsheet that i've been using since 2011 to track my income and expenses and help me pay off my debt so go ahead and get your laptop open we are going to be doing a whole tutorial on the 2021 google budget spreadsheet hey guys it's justine with debt free millennials the channel to help you crush your debt and live payment free if you are into debt free living then the number one tool that is going to help you get out of debt is your budget and i have been perfecting my budget spreadsheet for the past almost 10 years and i've made some important updates for 2021 so if you've been currently using my budget toolkit you'll want to stick around for this and if you're completely new i'm going to tell you exactly how to use it go ahead and scroll to the bottom in the description to get your budget kit for free and then i will meet you over in google spreadsheets and i'll show you how this bad boy works okay to get started with the toolkit you are going to head over to debtfreemillennials.com toolkit and you will go ahead and put your name and email address into these two boxes here and click the green button this is going to send you an email so that you can opt into receiving emails from me and then you will receive the link to the budget toolkit and that link is going to take you over here to google drive now right now i just have this as read only access so what you're going to have to do is highlight the dfm budget template and then you can right click it and then click make a copy and then you are going to re-label this to whatever your name is or whatever name you want the budget template to be and then save it to your google drive alternatively you can also download the template and use it as an excel spreadsheet so even if you don't have a google account you can download this as an excel spreadsheet and use it in the exact same way i also included a thermometer visual which is really awesome to print out and use to keep track of how much you are putting towards debt every single month and this is just a good visual indicator just to show you hey like i am making progress on my debt free journey and it's keeping your debt top of mind all right so let's go ahead and hop over to the budget template for 2021 and i'll show you how this works uh the this front page here is a guide to show you step by step what you can do if you want to follow along with the tutorial i actually have a blog post that outlines all of these steps as well if you want to read through it so step number one you're going to look under the yearly glance tab and this is going to be a breakdown of how your yearly salary or your yearly income is broken down into your expenses so i have a box specifically for all of your debt and if you need to make any changes at any time you can just highlight a row and then insert another row so that you can continue to add more debt items if you need to and same goes for your budget if there are things that are listed here that you're like i don't really use that go ahead and delete it and then add in a new row all these percentages are already calculated so if you change something with your rent for example it's going to automatically update those percentages and your yearly expenses for that particular budgeted item as well now this is the only tab where you're going to see this yearly column and you'll see that i have these little black arrows in the upper right hand corner of some of the cell boxes just to give you a description of what that means so for example i gave you a little note here about car insurance that if you pay your car insurance premium every six months like i do which is going to give you the best discount on your car insurance then you can just take the at that amount that you owe and divide it into six monthly payments and then that's exactly what you're saving every single month i go over that in a sinking funds video so if you're interested in how those types of things work where you're maybe not making payments every single month on that particular thing but you still want to save for it sinking funds is a great option and i will link to that video all right so let's hop over to the first monthly budget template and i'll show you exactly how this is broken down so i break down my budget templates into four main categories and they're called the four f's so i have fixed fun fudge and future and again if you highlight on that cell it's going to give you a description of what exactly those subsections of your budget means so your fixed budgeted items are things that you know you pay for every single month and a lot of times those expenses do not change in price so things like your rent or your mortgage your cell phone bill your internet bill a lot of those things don't change and then groceries you're obviously going to buy every single month so i include it in fixed your fund budget category are any kind of miscellaneous discretionary spending so not essential spending but a nice to have so for many of us that includes restaurants or going out with friends shopping pocket money is just cash that you keep in your wallet however i think a lot of us are going cash-free nowadays so if this doesn't make sense to you highlight that row and delete it and then i also include a fun money category fun money is just basically whatever i deem as fun spending so that includes getting coffees for my husband it's going out on golf trips that sort of thing goes under fun money and then what's new for 2021 is subscriptions so this was a lot simpler for me as i was budgeting this past year to have all my subscriptions in one category so things like netflix spotify amazon prime any kind of iphone app subscriptions that you might have can all be included here now if you pay for some of those subscriptions on an annual basis like annual prime you can just divide out that expense by 12 months and then you can save for that expense every single month along with some of your other monthly expenses like spotify or netflix next is fudge and a lot of people are like does this mean like the candy item no this just means this is your buffer budget category so if you forget about something or something goes missing in your budget and you're like where do i put this it goes into this miscellaneous category and then if you find yourself pulling from your fudge money often then that means it's time to make its own category in its own home in your budget so this is really just a cushion for your budget in case anything were to go over the fourth major subcategory of your budget is going to be future so every good budget includes a savings category and i typically include the emergency fund and your vacation fund now if you are already debt free or you don't have any debt you can also include a category for outside investing and that investing could include anything from robo advisor platforms like robinhood to brokerage accounts like vanguard or td ameritrade and you can add a category here and add some money to your outside investing and when i say outside investing i mean outside your typical 401k contributions now speaking of 401k contributions this is new for this year is i actually included a whole box for your pre-tax paycheck contributions so if you are a w-2 earner or if you pay for different insurance then this is really going to help you keep track of it i kept this separate from the rest of your budget because these are pre-tax contributions so you're actually not paying for these things outside of your take home so this is before your take home right but i think it's so important that we pay attention to these things because a lot of times when i was earning a w-2 paycheck i just looked at the bottom line what am i actually taking home instead of seeing oh my gosh i'm actually spending 75 dollars per paycheck on dental insurance and that just seems really high so i think when you keep track of this every single month and you can keep track of it per paycheck and then per month and then kind of see how much you've spent in each of those deduction categories is going to help you re-evaluate your insurance programs and then also how you're contributing to things like retirement or a health savings account so these two things oh well all of these things are very important but if you're over paying in anything like health insurance or vision or dental it's a great way to check back in with yourself each year when open enrollment happens so that you know okay this is exactly how much i i want in this type of coverage and how much i'm going to be spending just keeps that awareness top of mind now going back up to the top you're going to have a complete box for all of your debts just like the yearly glance and you're going to see all of your debts listed here and you can add different debts and change these around as you needed i just put these in as an example so you're going to list out your debt the minimum monthly payment what you actually paid for that month so the goal is to actually pay more than than the minimum and then i also added interest rates because i think it's a good idea so that you can rearrange things if you're using the debt snowball method or the debt avalanche method especially debt avalanche is paying off your debt according to the highest interest rate so then you can reprioritize some of these debts so in this example you would be paying off the chase credit card first and then working your way down to discover and so on and then you'll have the total debt balance and list that and update that every single month and then over here is your income box so your forecasted section is what you think you will bring home in income and what you think your total monthly expenses will be and then in the actual column this is what you actually made for that month so sometimes if you are receiving income from side hustling picking up extra side side jobs or selling unwanted items that needs to be reported in your budget as income and then your budget is going to take your total monthly income subtract out your monthly expenses and then you are going to have your net your net balance should be zero that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be spending all of your income for that month it just means every single dollar has a spot so you can either use it if you have a surplus to pay off more debt move it towards savings ear market for a future purchase and make sure you have all of your dollars accounted for so if you have a net like this of 473 dollars and you have all of this debt sitting over here i would be very tempted to put some of that money towards your debt okay so that's the income and expenses the total monthly income and expenses boxes with your budgeted items what you're going to do at the beginning of every single month is update your forecasted column so the forecasted is what you think you will spend in each category and you're going to make a goal for each of these categories these can be changed and updated as often as you would like i typically do this at the first of the month and then sometimes i'll do a mid-month check-in if you're brand new to budgeting i highly suggest doing this every single week maybe doing this on a sunday evening and then you're going to first forecast this and then those weekly check-ins you are going to record what you actually spent in each of these categories so for groceries you're going to highlight that cell and you'll see up here that i actually have three different numbers in here that i've added together that's because i went to the grocery store three separate times and so if you forget that you've actually gone three times sometimes i'll even right click and i'll insert a note and i'll say costco kroger kroger and then i know those expenses were from costco and kroger two times i went to kroger so then i can go back and see exactly how often i went to the grocery store now this is gonna be more manual than using an app but being manual with your budget means that you have more control and you're actually feeling those transactions and those expenses again so what i like to do is i like to open my bank account or my credit card statement and go through every single transaction line and update my budget accordingly by putting the equal sign and then adding in each transaction as it corresponds to the budgeted item now you're gonna probably be doing this a lot for categories like groceries and then for a lot of the fun spending as well restaurants shopping subscriptions clothing you're going to find yourself updating those categories a little bit more regularly than things like rent that only happens one time or your cell phone bill that only happens one time another column that you should pay attention to is the running total column so if you would like to have money roll over into the next month you can add it to the running total so i like to do this if i'm saving up for something and i do it for things like clothing apartment decor and shopping i also do it for future savings accounts so if i want to build up maybe a clothing budget and i'm not spending a hundred dollars every month but i would like to roll over that hundred dollars every single month then i'm going to record what i actually spent and then in the running total i'm going to take what money i set aside in the forecasted column 100 minus what i actually spent and this is the money that i have left over 76 then when i'm ready for the next month i can simply go down here to the january tab click this little arrow and then click duplicate so this is going to make a copy of your budget i suggest doing this at the beginning of every single month so that you have the most up-to-date running totals and then you're just going to re-label this for the next month just like that so that's why i didn't include every single month in this template because yours is going to vary drastically from the template and i don't want you to feel like you have to continuously change and update start with january and then you can duplicate it so that you have all of your cells ready to go and highlighted that fits your financial situation okay so that's how the budget template works you're gonna see these totals down here at the bottom that shows you exactly how much you forecasted for the month what you've actually spent for the month and those things are going to automatically update over here in the total monthly expenses so you can see that i actually still have 59 dollars left over for my forecasted column so technically i still have this money to allocate so i could actually put maybe you know another 240 i can increase my groceries budget and then i have 19 left over so you can continue to update and tweak your budget as you see this number go down and like i said this one should be close to zero as possible if you have money left over it needs to be allocated if you have a negative amount that means you went over budget and you need to fix some things all right so that's a big quick rundown of my budget toolkit template i hope you find this tool helpful and if you have any questions hop over into the comments i'm happy to answer them okay so that is your complete rundown of the debt free millennials budget tool kit i'm curious in the comments below what you think of this tool if this is something that you're currently using or you're just starting to use what do you think this is a tool that has helped me pay off thirty five thousand dollars in student loan debt in just two and a half years making 37 000 in salary and since then it has also helped me hit big financial goals such as saving cash for our subaru forester we've saved over a hundred thousand dollars towards a down payment for our first house and all of these goals could not have been as achievable had i not tracked it using my budget template and making sure i was holding myself accountable to those different budget categories so go ahead get that toolkit if you haven't already this is a free tool that i'm offering to all of my dfm family and i will catch you guys in the next video