Simplify Your Monthly Bills Template for Technical Support

Monthly bills template for Technical Support

this is my budget for the month of December which is typically when people spend the most money however as you can see in this month I'm going to be saving close to 80% of my income now it wasn't always like this because last year I was saving around 60% of my income which is still really good but 5 years ago I was saving close to 0% or in other words I was sort of living paycheck to paycheck and I just remember I absolutely hated that feeling of knowing that every single month whatever money I had inside of my bank account was basically just staying the same or even decreasing so what I did was I create this budgeting template here that I still use to this day I tracked my spending used that budget every single month and I implemented four money Frameworks that we're going to talk about here in this video and by doing that I was able to get my savings rate to slowly increase and then eventually Skyrocket up to what it is today so I want to show you guys my process for exactly how I did that and how you can do the same and of course I'm going to have my exact budgeting template available to download completely for free later on if you stick around to see how to use it first but I promise you at the very least that if you try this out and then stick with it you're going to start to save more and stress less when it comes to your money now I don't want to waste any time here so let's start off by jumping over to that budgeting template to sort of explain the first money framework that I think is so important and that is to run yourself like a profitable business now to show you what that means if we look over here in that file We have basically four main zones and what I've realized after years of budgeting is that organizing my budget into these zones sort of helps me to visualize my expected spending habits in a month versus my actual spending habits to see how well I'm managing my cash flow so we have our income budget in the top left and then below that is the expenses budget and then in the top right we have our actual income and below that are the actual expenses so let me explain how all that works now the income budget in the top left is basically what we're estimating we're going to earn from our job our side hustles or anything else so for example if you're working a regular 9 to-5 job and you know you get bi-weekly paychecks then you probably get the same amount deposited into your bank account from your employer about twice per month and you can go ahead and enter those numbers here so for this video let's pretend that we get paid $1,700 twice per per month on the 8th and the 22nd now to keep it simple if you're a W2 employee and you already have taxes withheld by your employer then you could just literally enter exactly what you receive from each paycheck but if you get paid without having taxes with held then maybe take your income and multiply it by 0.65 to account for money that you're going to have to set aside for taxes so for example if we make maybe a hundred bucks by delivering Uber Eats as a side hustle we're probably going to have to pay taxes on that at some point so I could write a basic formula here that says equals 100 * 0.6 five and then press enter and so my true net take-home pay after taxes would be more like 65 bucks but for this example right here right now I'm going to delete that side hustle and just pretend that we only have those two $1,700 paychecks to start now for the expenses budget underneath that in the bottom left of this sheet this is going to be what we're projecting to spend in different categories throughout the month so again at the beginning of the month after we write down our expected income the next TI we want to separate our expenses into different categories down here so basically we want to set our budget by filling out how much we expect to pay for for things like rent groceries a car payment and other stuff like that based on our previous spending habits and I went ahead and entered in some of those things in this section as examples for this video I like to try to get as specific as possible when I'm breaking down these spending categories into different fixed expenses and recurring payments that I know I'm going to have each month but then I also try to include more variable expenses as well that could be a bit more generic like miscellaneous shopping and even trips to coffee shops so the idea here is just to find what works for you to estimate your total monthly spending now in terms of that first money framework to run yourself like a profitable business to do that what we would want to see here is that obviously our estimated income minus our estimated expenses equals something that is greater than zero because that means as a business we would be left with an expected profit at the end of the month so to calculate that profit along with the savings rate what I did was I created these yellow sales down here but for this example we can see that our estimated income and our estimated expenses are both $3,400 so right now for this month we're projecting to have $0 in profit and a 0% savings rate which like I said was exactly where I was at 5 years ago so the goal is to figure out how to improve that now living paycheck to paycheck with a 0% savings rate is tough but it's also pretty common with over 60% of people living that way however I actually think the true number of people who are paycheck the paycheck is a lot higher than that with just less people realizing it and the reason for that has to do with a big problem that a lot of people seem to have which is that they either have no idea how much they spend each month or they just grossly underestimate their spending so going back to that example of somebody projecting their expenses to be $3,400 per month with all these categories the scary truth is that number could be a lot higher if they're just guessing now this leads me to the second money framework and honestly this is such a crucial step that most people for some reason are just not willing to take even though it would put them ahead of probably 90% of the population so that is to track your spending down to every last dollar for 2 to 3 months to better understand your spending habits and maybe some people out there just don't want to put in the effort to do that while some other people are actually genuinely afraid to look because they don't want to know how much they spend but the fact is that if you want to increase the amount you save each month then eventually you just got to face reality and see where you're at I actually like to relate this to another area of life that a lot of people struggle with which is food and diet so my freshman year at Penn State I started hitting the gym every day and eating whatever food I could so I could try to build muscle and get in better shape but I didn't realize the food that I was eating was just terrible and I think I actually got into worse shape because of it since it was just bad dining hall and takeout food so one day I decided that I was going to track the protein carbs and fats that I was eating without changing anything just so I could see exactly what I was fueling my body with and after about a week of tracking my food I was just shocked at how terrible my eating habits were but now I sort of had that Baseline of what I was consuming so started cutting out bad foods and then adding in good foods with more protein and stuff like that which helped me out a ton and put me in a much better place with my health and the point of that story is that 5 years ago when I was living paycheck to paycheck I knew I had to do the exact same thing and track my spending habits just like I tracked my eating habits so I could see what needed to change so back to the the budgeting template again just track your expenses for a few months so you can get a good idea of what your normal spending habits are really like and that's going to help you to get much more accurate numbers for this estimated expenses section and then you can try to adjust those numbers later on by cutting back in certain categories to increase your personal monthly profit now the next step here in the sheet after we've entered in our expected numbers is to track our actual income and expenses to see if we're staying within our budget for a certain month and that's exactly what we're going to do here with the two zones on the right so it's pretty easy but in this top right Z here for actual income throughout the month we want to just write down our income as we receive it from our paychecks or any other sources so for this example let's just say I did end up getting my two paychecks as expected which added up to $3,400 now below that for the actual expenses you can fill this out at the end of the month or what I like to do if possible is every week or every other week I try to log into my credit cards and my bank accounts to fill in these expenses so I can really stay on top of things and get better live feedback but basically as an example here let's say I wanted to go ahead and track my rent expense which is due on the first day of the month so I could typee rent in here and then for the vendor column I'll just type in landlord but for this blue column under category and this green column under amount paid I colorcoded these to make it easier to understand so for the formulas to work the blue category column here on the right needs to match up exactly with the spelling under the blue category column over on the left and then this file is basically going to recognize that and then whatever amount we put in the green amount paid column over on the right that is going to be added up under the same category in the green column on the left so if I type rent in the blue column which matches up with the category in our budget that we want to track and then if I enter in our rent expense as $1,600 that was paid what we're going to see is that will log it over there on the left and that actual amount matches up perfectly with our expected amount which means that we're within budget and then over on the right we can also enter in other things that are optional like the date what credit card we use and if we earn any points because obviously I'm a big credit card nerd over here on this channel next let's say I'm logging my grocery expenses and I went to the grocery store a few times this month so if I type in groceries Foods as the vendor and then the category is going to be groceries again to match up exactly with that blue category column on the left and then we'll say we paid $120 because groceries can get expensive so that's going to log over on the left under the actual amount that we paid so that again we can see exactly how much we're spending and if we're within budget but let's add a few more grocery trips for the month here so let's do groceries at Whole Foods again under the groceries category for $130 this time and then let's just repeat that a couple more times here as well by dragging that down here in this sheet and then we'll say we spent $25 and then $100 on the next two grocery trips now what you can see on the left is that with each time I enter a grocery expense as long as I tag at the right way with the grocery category then my budget template here is going to add up any amount that's tagged as groceries and it's going to show us that total sum in the green actual amount column but now let's say that we're still in December and I got to do one more trip to the grocery store for another 100 bucks so again we'll enter that in under the actual expenses and after that's entered you're going to see on the left that now we're at $575 total grocery spending which is above the $500 budget for that month and what I did was I told this file to automatically go ahead and make that sell red so we can see that we're over budget in that category for the month and then maybe next month we could try to cut back a bit so basically the main point of this budgeting template is to make sure that anyone who uses it just becomes more conscious about their spending habits because I truly think that many people out there just have no idea about this stuff also as a quick side note here but this is sort of a budget that's designed for a single person or for couples who budget together with combined finances but if you want to keep things sep with a partner or even a roommate or somebody like that then I made a similar twers budget in another tab that we can click on at the bottom of this file here so I added one extra column there and the way that would work with expenses is that for example if you paid $1,600 for rent but then the other person is going to pay back for half of that then you would just enter in rent and then rent as the category as well and then maybe paid a total of $1,600 but you're only responsible for $800 of that so you would just type that in there and then only $800 is going to get tracked over on the left side now back over to the normal budget tab let's just say that we filled out the rest of our actual expenses throughout the month so I'm actually going to go ahead and copy over some numbers from our expenses budget over to the actual expenses to keep things moving along let's say that we changed up some of these numbers and that I actually spent under budget for miscellaneous and for dining so at the end of the month even though I was over budget for groceries with that red sale there I'm still left with a small profit of $135 which is under my budget and also equal to a 4% savings rate when everything gets added up at the bottom here now with that profit we should try to do something with it by investing in maybe a ra Ira a brokerage account or something like that but at the very least make sure you're putting any leftover profit you have into something like a high yield savings account where your money is going to be able to sit there and at least earn some interest at a competitive rate personally I've been using Sofi checking and savings over the past few years because they're paying out one of the best rates at up to 4.60% apy as I'm filming this and right now you can also get a bonus of up to $300 if you use my link and then deposit a certain amount and set up direct deposit so I'll leave in affiliate link for that down below if you want to go ahead and check that out but like I said I really love Sofi and I'm happy to have them as a partner of the channel here now having any profit left over at the end of the month is a huge accomplishment but if we were running a profitable business then we might want to try to increase that profit over time by growing it with each following month and the simple way to think about increasing a profit as we run ourselves like a business is that we have two options so we can decrease our expenses or we can increase our Revenue which in this case means increasing our income for myself and most other people we want to start by focusing on decreasing expenses first because there's a lot less time and work involved to just Target certain areas where we can cut back on spending and this leads me to the third money framework of this video that helped me to slowly start to grow my own savings rate when I first started budgeting so that is to focus on cutting big than small now what I mean by that is that if we take a look at the actual budget versus the estimated spending in the sheet we can see not only where we might be overspending but we can also see exactly what categories are the largest dollar amounts and what we want to do as we look to decrease our expenses is we want to try to cut back on the highest spend categories first if possible which right here could be things like rent groceries our car payment and miscellaneous spending too the mistake that a lot of people make is they look to cut out the obvious but less expensive stuff first like coffee spending or they cancel subscriptions like Netflix but the problem there is those are not the expenses that are really going to be hurting us the most because if we play around this file here and we cut those out we still only go from a 4% savings rate to a 6% savings rate and yeah that's a little bit higher but it's not really going to have that much of an impact and we might be cutting out things that bring us happiness because most people enjoy getting their favorite coffee to start their day or they like watching their favorite TV show to relax on Netflix at night so what we really want to focus on first are the big expenses and then after that we can start to eliminate some of those unnecessary smaller expenses if we want to however cutting back on those big spending categories can be a little bit tough because that might require some small sacrifices and maybe even some lifestyle changes but again if we really want to have the most impact in the least amount of time time then cutting back on those things is really the best thing you can do for your budget for me when I started to live on my own I just chose to live in a small old studio apartment in Philadelphia instead of a newer updated one-bedroom place because it was going to save me a few hundred per month and then eventually when me and my fiance moved in together we started to split rent so we both ended up saving more from that so for the example in the sheet right away I would start looking at that rent expense and then see if I can lower it by maybe living with a roommate to drop that down from 1,600 to maybe 800 bucks a month and right away that one move would help us to jump up to a 28% savings rate some people might even consider doing the tough thing and move back home with their parents if they need to and not everyone is going to be able to do that but that was another major way that I saved so much money right after I graduated from college and cutting out rent here by moving back home would actually jump us up to a 51% savings rate then I'd also look to cut back on groceries by shopping at Walmart Aldi or Trader Joe's instead of going to Whole Foods like I mentioned before because maybe we'd be able to save at least another hundred bucks per month month or more and some people could even get rid of the car payment by selling their car and living within walking distance to their job or even just downgrading their car to something more affordable the point here again is to focus on reducing the big expenses in your budget first and then after that you can start to cut back on the smaller stuff now personally in my own situation once I got my spending habits tracked and then I started decreasing my largest expenses I was able to get my monthly savings rate up to maybe 10 to 20% or so but the truth is there is going to be a limit as to how much you can actually reduce your expenses while still living a comfortable life that makes you happy and at some point once you've optimized all your expenses then you got to turn all your time and attention over to the income side of the profit equation so that leads me to the fourth money framework here which is that decreasing expenses is good but increasing income is better now obviously increasing your income is easier said than done but if you really want to get a savings rate that's 60 70 or 80% plus then after you've built up a good budgeting Foundation you need to find ways to increase your income because the most important thing to remember here is there is going to be a limit to how much you can reduce your expenses but increasing your income is unlimited for me whenever I had some free time outside of my 9 to-5 job that paid me a salary of around $70,000 per year I started selling things online I tried all these side hustles and eventually I started making YouTube videos here on this channel so at first I made 0 on YouTube for 6 months but then I made an extra 100 bucks per month and then eventually I started making up to $11,000 per month on top of my full-time job and somehow this just became my full-time thing because I did see it as the best opportunity that I had to earn multiple six figures per year so because I've kept my monthly expenses consistently around $3,600 per month and I've also continued to increase my income up to roughly now around $118,000 per month after business expenses and taxes that's how I've been able to reach that 80% savings rate which I feel really really fortunate to have now most people are not going to want to start a YouTube channel but everyone out there has some sort of a skill they can monetize and in some way or if you're working towards just a higher paying career path like being a doctor or a lawyer right now then maybe you just have to be patient while you wait for your income to increase at some point in a few years but no matter what your situation is just keep your spending under control by using this budgeting template right here and then Focus the majority of your time and energy on just increasing your income or at least moving up in your career now if you want to download this template then I'm going to have a link down below that you can go ahead and check out again completely for free and with that download I'm going to include this normal budget along with the two person budget where you can play around change up the categories and the numbers for yourself but I'm also going to include a free net worth tracker as well where you can see your wealth grow over time as you start to save and invest more each month and all that I ask in return is for you to go ahead and just tap the like button and subscribe down below to show support for this video and also share it with a friend or family member who you think could benefit from it but as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one