Budgeting is definitely a lifeskill, and one that we’re not taught nearly enough about as part of our education.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a father who majored in Economics and who worked in the insurance industry1, so whether I liked it or not some aspects of financial literacy were drilled into me from a young age. On top of that, the Personal Management merit badge is required in order to reach Eagle Scout, which if anything is even more practical and helpful than learning how to tie knots or fire a shotgun.
Then when I started college I had to pay attention to how much leftover loan money I had available for non-collegiate activities so I could be smart about my partying and tomfoolery, so I began keeping a budgetary sheet early on. Back then it was a photocopy of a blank copy of my father’s budget sheet, which itself has its hazy origins in the 1970’s.
Well, over the years that photocopy was replaced by a meticulously hand-drawn version on square-rule paper, which was in turn replaced by an Excel version, which was iterated for a solid decade before I moved it to Google Sheets when that became a thing, and then kept refining and adding to my Sheets budgetary tracker for another 8 years after that.
Which takes us to today! After over two decades of refinement and expansion I finally feel comfortable about sharing my budgetary tools with the wider world2:
I encourage everyone to create or download a copy of the worksheet and make it your own! (Just go to “File > Make a copy” or “File > Download…”).
The first “README” tab has more detailed description of the tabs available—see also below:
| Tab Name | Description / Use |
|---|---|
| 25_BUDGET | Current year budgetary sheet with references to 25_EXPENSES tab to show sums of expense categories per month (the cells highlighted in Grey are autopopulated from the Expenses sheet). |
| 25_EXPENSES | Tab to enter all personal EXPENSES details throughout the year based on the categories defined in the 25_BUDGET sheet, which is fed back into the BUDGET sheet. |
| INCOME_REF | A neato reference of estimated different annual and monthly takehome INCOMES based on wage or salary, taking into account approximate taxation. This one is fun to play with! |
| TAX_TRACKER | A tab to keep track of your Federal, State, and Local TAXES over time, including AGI values, effective tax rates, IRS pins, etc. |
| INSURANCE_TRACKER | A tab to keep track of INSURANCE premiums over time, with a chart for easy visualization. |
| INVESTMENT_TRACKER | A tab to keep track of stocks, RSUs, ESPPs, and other INVESTMENTS you may own. Has references to live values based on stock ticker, and approximate gain/loss calculations. |
| 25_BUS_INC | A sheet to record small business INCOME. |
| 25_BUS_EXP | A sheet to record small business EXPENSES and categorize them. |
| 25_BUS_SUM | A SUMMARY sheet for small businesses & sole proprietorships, pulling data from both INCOME and EXPENSES. |
| REF_DATA | Tab for DATA referenced in other tabs and formulas, for example expense categories, which you can edit/add to here to be whatever you want to keep track of. |
| IRS_EXPENSE_CATS | Copy-pasted list of IRS categories for business expenses, for reference. |
Hopefully even just one or two of the tabs may be useful to many of you, at least as a starting point as you make your own edits and refinements. Happy Budgeting!
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