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Monthly bills template for IT

hey everyone thanks for watching if you're looking for a pre-built microsoft excel budget spreadsheet template that does everything from looking at your previous spending trends to forecasting your future financial circumstances then this is the video for you by the end of this video you'll know how to download and use my top of the line budget smarter budget spreadsheet template in microsoft excel you'll be able to answer questions like will i have enough money to pay my bills later on in the year if i take this vacation now or if i buy this car now you may even realize that you've stumbled upon a way of budgeting that can be life-changing stick around to find out how [Music] before we actually dive in it might be wise to answer the question what exactly is the budget smarter excel budget spreadsheet it's simple really it's a budget that gives you a view into your spending habits and forecasts how much money you'll have in the future all at the same time just provide a list of your income and expenses and watch the smarter budget go to work first you'll be provided with a running balance that looks into the future you can answer questions like can i go on vacation now and still have enough money to pay my bills at the end of the year then as you go if you realize you need to adjust your spending habits based on what you see in the future just pull up the dashboard and get answers to questions around historical spending trends and make decisions on where you can cut back your spending to make a short story shorter it's a life-changing way of budgeting once you've gotten to the description of this video and clicked on the link to download the budget smarter budget spreadsheet template and have downloaded it the first thing you need to make sure that you do is click on enable content at the top of the spreadsheet in the yellow bar once you've done that you should be good to go if you don't click on enable content it will not work alright the first thing we need to do for the budget smarter budget template to start working for us is fill out the setup page in order to fill out the setup page we need the current balance of our checking account including any pending transactions you'll also need an estimate of how much money you make from each paycheck that you'll be entering into the budget you'll also need a list of your fixed expenses like your mortgage core payments or student loan payments along with their due dates and an estimate of your payment amount each time you pay them let's start by adding the starting balance of your checking account into cell b4 for this example i'll enter it as a thousand dollars and hit enter now i need to enter today's date or the date that you'd like to start your budget from i'll enter today's date which when i'm recording this is august 15 2022 now i can start entering my fixed reoccurring income this for most people would be an estimate of how much money you make with each paycheck for this example i'm going to name this paycheck income source 1 but you can name it anything you want i'm going to say that i make 1200 each time and that i receive this paycheck on a bi-weekly basis so i'll choose bi-weekly from this drop down my next payday for this income source is august 26th now you may notice that semi-monthly is not an option in the occurrence drop down i know some folks get paid on the first and the 15th of each month because of the types of formulas that are in the background of this spreadsheet there needed to be a simple work around for the issue to ensure the file didn't get too big in this case you'll need to add the income source twice each as monthly for the first time that you add it you would put the first as the first payday for the second time that you added you would add the 15th as the start date okay so let's talk end date the end date does need to be entered it's there in case you're only planning on this income source for a specific period if you aren't aware of any end date i'd suggest putting the 31st of december of either of the next two years as the end date regardless of how long you plan on receiving the income source you shouldn't go any further out than three years from the start date for this one i'm just going to put 12 31 2024 that's basically two and a half years from now okay so let's talk categories this is where you must choose what category you want to put this income source in right now when i select a drop down i get a list of example categories this is where you get to be creative starting in cell b12 is where you can choose what you name your categories since this paycheck falls under normal income that's when i'm going to title this category i'm going to do that in cell b12 now when i go back to the drop down list i should notice that the category name that you've just created is at the top of the drop down list you may have to scroll up in some cases i'm going to do the same exact thing for my second source of income i'm going to title this one as income source two we'll say that this is my wife's paycheck she makes a thousand dollars on a bi-weekly basis her first payday is also 8.26 i'm going to select the same end date and i'm also going to add this under the normal income category this is where i want to take a second to give a quick suggestion many of you do not make the same exact amount each pay period that might be dependent on how many hours you work or if you work any overtime for the sake of this budget i would suggest budgeting on the lower end of what you make versus what you make on the higher end that way it gives you a little bit of cushion down the road once we have all of our income entered this is where we can put the budget to work for us if you flip over to the fixed transaction tab you'll notice that it is currently blank we need excel to add all of our fixed income sources from the start date to the end date in these columns let me show you how that works i'll flip back to the setup tab from there i'll click the add income button and watch the budget go to work it may take a few seconds here but once it stops flashing you should be able to flip back over to the fixed expenses tab and see all your income has been added in order from oldest to newest with the crack dollar amounts and categories we'll come back to this later first i want to show you something cool if you go over to the budget smarter tab you'll notice that your starting balance and the starting date is listed there click the button that says update budget smarter tab and give it a few seconds to work you should now see a running balance after all of your income is added take a long look at that that's a lot of money unfortunately once you start adding all of your expenses that's going to drop dramatically so let's flip back to the setup page we're going to add all of our fixed expenses the same exact way we entered all of our fixed income i'll add the first couple of expenses which should give you a good understanding of the process the first expense that i'll add is my mortgage so on the first row under fixed expenses i'll title it mortgage again you can title whatever you want here for this example we'll say that my mortgage is twelve hundred dollars i pay that monthly and i pay that on the first of every month so the first due date would be september first i'm going to do the same thing that i did with my fixed income for the end date i'm just going to put 1231 of 2024. i'm actually going to give my mortgage payment its own category so before i select the category i want it to fall under in the drop down i have to name my customizable category mortgage once i do that it will show up in the drop down if i scroll all the way up alright so i'll add one more expense here so you get the idea and then i'll kind of speed through it the next one i'll add is amazon free time for those of you that don't know what that is it gives me the ability to manage what my kids are playing on and viewing on their tablets it's a monthly subscription so i'll title it amazon free time this one comes in at eight dollars a month so i'll type eight dollars under amount and select monthly again from the occurrences drop down the due date is august 18th i'm going to choose the same end date for this one as the others so i'll put 12 31 of 2024. now i need to categorize this expense i think i'll label this one under entertainment i don't have an entertainment category yet in the drop down so i'll need to create one okay i think you get the idea here so i'm just going to speed through me entering the rest of my expenses so that we can move on to the next part of the video okay so now i have a whole list of fixed expenses here with their due dates the amounts and how often they happen now similar to what i was saying about the income that you add i would suggest making any estimates on the higher end to give yourself some cushion for example if you generally spend anywhere from 150 to 200 on your utility bill every month i would budget 200 instead of 150. one other suggestion that i might make would be to add a weekly grocery budget or a weekly gas budget to your fixed expenses for instance if you typically spend 150 a week on groceries i'd budget that as a weekly fixed expense the same could be said for gas or anything else that might not necessarily be a fixed expense but it could be something that you have to purchase or pay for regularly it'll just help you budget later you might also want to add a holiday budget here as well if it's the middle of august but you want to plan 500 for a holiday budget later in the year you might want to add that to here too you would make that an annual expense and put a start date of later in the year this is also where you may want to plan a bi-weekly or monthly transfer to your savings account right now i've got a 300 transfer going to savings each time i get paid okay let's move on when i flip over to the fixed transactions tab or the budget smarter tab those items will not show up and only shows the income that's because i have to flip back to the setup page and click on add expenses and watch excel go to work it typically will take a few seconds once excel is done doing its thing you should be able to jump back over to the fixed transactions tab and see all the expenses in order with the correct occurrences until the end date that you set for each transaction if you notice that you've made any mistakes on the original setup with either fixed income or fixed expenses you can go back and fix it on the setup page and then click on either add income or add expenses again and it'll refresh the fixed transactions page however once you've completed the setup page initially i wouldn't recommend making any changes to the setup page once you've been using your budget for a little while those adjustments should be made to the actual fixed transactions page which we'll go over in a bit all right now that we have both the fixed income sources set up and the fixed expenses set up we are ready to add those to the budget smarter page this is where the budget gets cool i'll flip over to the budget smarter tab from there i'll click on update budget smarter tab and watch excel go to work once this is complete you can start seeing where you may need to make some adjustments to your spending or savings based on what you're seeing in the final balance for instance i'm seeing that if i keep spending the way i'm spending i'm not going to have any cushion and it looks like i'm going to actually go negative in the beginning of september that tells me that i need to go back to the setup page to see if there are any kind of adjustments that i can make as low hanging fruit from my perspective the best move for me right now would probably be to cancel any subscriptions that i have i'm not gonna do that though because i'm bad instead i'm gonna adjust the amount of savings each pay period from three hundred dollars to 150 dollars and see what that does so i'll change the dollar amount from 300 to 150 now with this adjustment there are two things that i need to do first i need to click on add expenses and watch excel go to work once it has done its thing i'm going to go back over to the budget smarter tab and click on update smarter budget tab again now when i scroll through there isn't any more negative dollar amounts the neat thing is that this page will allow you to see into the future and make adjustments to what you're spending now so that you have peace of mind that you'll have enough money down the road some of you may look at this running balance and wonder where all of your money has been going because it appears that you should have a lot left over this might mean that you need to adjust your saving habits a bit to ensure that you're putting more of that away in savings okay now that we've got that established there are still two more topics to cover we need to talk about how you might add variable expenses like dining out or spontaneous spending but first we should discuss making periodic adjustments to your fixed income and fixed expense dollar amounts we'll do this by making adjustments on the fixed transactions tab after you've been using your budget for a while you shouldn't really be making any adjustments on the setup page they should happen on the fixed transactions page so on the fixed transactions tab you can see that there are green columns for your fixed income and pink columns for your fixed expenses within both the green columns and the pin columns you should have one for estimated amount and one for actual amount let's talk income first more than likely your plan for fixed income is based on what your best guess will be but you'll want to make adjustments to the amount for that specific paycheck once you actually receive it you can do that in the actual amount column for instance let's say that i estimated twelve hundred dollars for my first paycheck on eight twenty six when i get that paycheck it's actually 1251.23 i'll make that adjustment in the actual amount column and hit enter the same can be said for any fixed expenses i would suggest taking one day out of the week and pulling up your online banking and making any adjustments to the actual amounts for your fixed expenses as you go for instance let's say that instead of amazon free time being eight dollars on 8 15 let's say that it's actually 7.49 i would enter that under actual amount and hit enter the other thing that i would suggest is to mark that you've reviewed each transaction as you go for instance if you've updated these two transaction amounts i would mark yes in the reviewed columns that doesn't do anything in the budget other than to let you know that you've been here and check the box that says it's the correct amount if you don't make any adjustments to the estimated amounts the estimated amounts will show up in the budget smarter page once you update that page if you do adjust the actual amount the actual amount will show up in the budget smarter page once you update that page as you are reviewing your online banking on your designated day of the week this is a really good time to add any variable expenses or income that you notice there as well we'll do that by flipping over to the variable transactions page let's run through two quick examples here let's pretend that i just got a birthday check for my mom for a hundred dollars this would be a good spot to add that transaction so i'll add the date as the date of deposit which was today i'll describe it as a birthday check now i'm going to pick a category i don't think i want to use normal income as the category for this one so i'm actually going to go back to the setup page and add extra income as a new category as soon as i do that i should be able to flip back over to the variable transaction page and immediately choose that as an option from the category list since this is income i'll put the hundred dollars in the income column all right as i'm reviewing my online banking i also realized i spent 23 dollars at mcdonald's three days ago so i'll add the date of the transaction and then i'll add mcdonald's as the description let's see if i have a category i like for this one i don't see one for dining out so i'm going to add that on the setup page as a new category then i'll go back to the variable transactions tab and choose this as a category then i'll add 23 dollars as the amount in the expense column since this is an expense okay so that's it for the variable expenses this week so now i've reviewed the actual amounts for all my fixed income and fixed expenses on my dedicated day of the week to do that i've also added any spontaneous expenses or income to the variable expense page now i'm ready to go to the budget smarter page and click update smarter budget tab once you do that you'll notice the running balance reflecting any updates to your actual amounts and your variable transactions will be added as well okay so once we have the budget smarter tab all squared away we can look at the dashboard page this will be the tab that gives us all the information about our historical spending trends before we do anything we'll want to click the refresh all tables button the first time you click this it might ask you if you want to replace existing data you'll choose yes for that there are several charts that you should get familiarized with let's start first with the top expense category chart this will list all the categories that you created and filter them by the highest amount spent in each category this should tell you where most of your money is going in the chart just to the right of that you'll notice a list of your highest dollar amounts by item description in the chart just to the right of that you'll notice a chart that shows exactly how much income you receive from each income source just above that chart you'll see an income versus debits graph this will show you how much money you've brought in versus how much money is going out ideally you want your income to always be greater than your expenses just to the left of the income versus debits chart you'll see a time series line graph that shows you different spending trends it looks a bit messy when all the transactions are added but we'll filter some of those out to make it look pretty speaking of filters on the very right hand side of the dashboard you'll find all of your filters you'll find one for the different years and the different months this should allow you to pick as many years and months as you'd like to pick for instance in the year filter you can toggle multiple selections on and off by clicking the three check marks with the three lines right here if you click it and it turns yellow that means you want to select multiple years if you click it and it turns gray that means that you only want to select one year the same can be said for months let's say that i only want to look at 2022 i'll make sure the toggle is gray and not yellow and then i'll select 2022 now let's say i only want to look at august of 2022 i'll make sure that the toggle switch is gray and i'll choose august you'll notice that all the charts and graphs update to only reflect august of 2022 now let's tell the dashboard to reflect august september and october i'll toggle the multiple selections tool to yellow and select august september and october you should notice all the grass and charts now reflecting all three of those months okay so i noticed that my transportation category is pretty high for those three months i want to find out why that is what kind of things am i spending my money on in the transportation category i can find that out by toggling the multiple select tool to gray in the category filter from there i can select the transportation category now i can see in the top expense by description table that my top expenses in the transportation category over these three months is my car payment if i click on car payment under the description filter i'll be able to see a line graph of the total i've spent over the past three months it's been the same exact amount over the past three months this feature might work really well if you want to go back and look at something like dining out or how much you've spent over the past three months on utilities all right i really hope you got something out of that video and you're as excited to get going as i am i really truly believe that the budget smarter template can be a life-changing way of budgeting forecasting your budget to the end of the year or next year or the year after that can give you so much peace of mind it can let you know that if you just stick to your budget you're gonna be okay not only can you look at your previous spending trends in the dashboard but you can look at the running balance and you can make adjustments to your spending or your saving based on what you're seeing in the future some may complete this budget and realize that they need to make changes to the way they're spending or they're going to run out of money later others may look at this budget and wonder where the rest of their money has been going that should tell you that you should make adjustments to the way you're spending so that you can save more let me know in the comments what kind of person you think you are are you the type of person that needs to make adjustments to their spending so that they have enough money at the end of the year or you the type of person that needs to spend less and save more then once you complete the budget come back and let me know in the comments if you were right i love hearing those stories alright thanks for watching see you next time