Hey all, long-time lurker here, first time poster. I want to share a financial plan template with the community that I've been iterating on for the past two years. Budgeting has completely changed how I perceive my earnings, expenditures, and savings, and I can't imagine where I'd be today without it. I hope this template can help others out there who are looking to get a better understanding of their finances or don't know quite where to start.
Background
Before jumping into the template, I just want to give a little background on myself. For years I always thought myself as decent with my money. I never found myself too deep into debt, saved a little here and there, and always managed to get by without too much worrying. Well, that was all fine until I ran into an unexpected financial hardship. Suddenly, budgeting became not just a smart thing to do but imperative.
Looking back, I wish I'd started budgeting sooner. I really didn't realize how little I knew about where my money was going until I started visualizing it. And that's exactly how this financial plan came to be.
Purpose
This template was made with the following goals:
1) Clearly visualize the breakdown of earnings, expenditures, and savings
2) Automatically update when revising expenditures, earnings, or savings amounts
3) Not rely on third-party financial tools which collect sensitive personal data
Who this is for
This template is best used for someone who isn't actively paying down debt. Of course, if you're in debt, you want to pay that down ASAP before putting money elsewhere. This template is about finding a balance in your take-home pay, and how to split it between an emergency fund, short-term savings, long-term savings, daily spending, and of course expenditures.
Account Definitions
This is discussed on this subreddit at length, but here's how I've defined these terms for myself:
Daily Spending — a checking account for any daily spending. This is what you use to buy a breakfast burrito or grab a drink with a friend.
expenditures — a dedicated checking account for expenditures. telephone bill, internet, rent, etc. all automatically deducts from here.
Emergency Fund — a savings account which holds cash for between 3-6 months of expenditures, just in case. Once this gets to a level you're comfortable with, you can stop or reduce the amount you regularly deposit.
Short Term Savings – a savings account for short-term savings. This can be defined however you want, but I think of it as money I'll spend in less than five years. This could be for a vacation or a big expense like a new computer.
Long-Term Savings – an capital account for money you won't want to withdraw for probably over 5-10 years. This is for something big, like a down payment on a house or just a place to invest in the long-run. You don't think about this money, and it's at the mercy of the sector.
The Template
Here's the template.
It's pre-filled with what an example financial plan might look like.
How to use
Blue cells are for inputting values.
Gray cells show calculated values.
earnings — enter your earnings information here. If you're a freelancer or don't get regular paychecks, look at previous years duty returns and guess-timate your annual earnings based on that.
expenditures — there are two tables here: one for regular expenditures, and one for irregular expenditures. A regular expense is, obviously, something you pay regularly – like a telephone bill or rent. An irregular expense is something like car maintenance or a yearly gym subscription.
lender Accounts — this is where the magic happens. Start entering values for your emergency fund, short-term savings, and long-term savings. This will give you an idea of how much money you can really afford to put away in different savings accounts. expenditures are automatically pulled in, and Daily Spending is calculated based on what you decide to save.
Long-Term Savings — totally optional, but I like seeing a breakdown of the funds I invest in, to visualize how aggressively I'm investing.
loan
Thank you so much to u/TheJMoore for their original post which served as the foundation for this template. They did all the actual hard work – like entering earnings and determining duty – I just updated, re-organized, and added some nice visualizations.
This template is based on an existing template I found online, and I would love to loan the original creator. The problem is, I can't remember where I found it or who originally made it. If someone knows who to loan the original template to, please let me know and I will loan them here. Also, thank you, stranger, for putting that O.G. template online and helping my life! I'm hoping to pay it forward here.
edit: fixin' couple typos
edit 2: added loan for the original template. thanks to the redditors who knew the original creator!
Very elegant workbook to look at. Nice job. My one comment: You should check the formula in cell D10 on the bank Accounts sheet. It’s leaving the first cell in the grid out if the SUM
This is very well organized. Nice work
Cool worksheet. My only recommendation would be to add one more sheet as a Dashboard view, so you don’t need to go through each of the individual sheets unless you need to look at details or update something.
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Great job!
Very cool! I always haphazardly keep track of this info.. I’ve been religiously tracking every dollar for 5 ish years but I need to do this to have all my “normal” facts and figures captured nicely
This is very cool! How do I make a copy of this for myself that’s editable?
I appreciate this SO much but cannot recommend using r/YNAB enough for those that are looking to start budgeting. it’s a system that has a solid foundation, based on zero-based budgeting, and an amazingly helpful community. You can input your own transactions if you don’t want to connect your accounts. Having separate checking/savings accounts for different purposes when you realize you can do all your separating within your budget rather than having to literally move money between your accounts without your accounts!
Edit: And the big difference is, you’re budgeting actual dollars earned rather than predicting/forecasting income. Give every dollar a job 🙂
Edit #2: this YNAB love thread is making me so happy 😂 it as good as we’re saying it is, everyone! And no, we’re not getting paid🤣
Oh google says some tools are unavailable because of high traffic on the sheet! I’ll try later 🙂
Great template. Perhaps add an additional sheet showing the fruits of Long/Short term savings over a prolonged period using the average of the index funds allocated and historical rates of return. This would help illustrate savings potential over the long term.
Wonderful job! and thank you very much.
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This is great.
Would someone please share a copy of the worksheet? OP’s is getting the Reddit Hug of Death and it appears Google has locked down some of the functionality.
800 rent…with a $60k income, where do you find such jobs with such a low cost of living? When I was making 60k the local rent market went like $950 the lowest dump and $1500 for a real one bedroom apartment. When I made 72k a few years later my rent was $1450. And now I make just over six figures, the rent that I needed to pay at the location to get the same quality of life is about $1700 to $2000 for a one bedroom.
It’s really good btw, nice work. One thing I would add is a 401k calculator with employer match…that would be great!
I don’t know if I’m reading that right but is that over a 1000 dollars of taxes a month??? I’m from Australia so maybe the taxes are less vicious here but 1000 a month seems brutal!
Love seeing people share there templates. Original Spreadsheet was made by /u/TheJMoore I believe.
Never realised how much tax you pay in America. Pretty much wiped out a third of your pay check.
Quick Google Docs tip so you don’t get people requesting edit access… In the URL you post publicly, replace everything after the last slash with “copy”. It’ll force anyone who clicks on it to save a copy to their own Drive before they can even look at it.
Edit: my first gold! Thanks, stranger! I’m always happy to share this tip… Really not sure why Google doesn’t advertise it as a feature.
Looks great! Lots of good information and visually pleasing. I know that what you posted is only an example budget but I have two suggestions. First is that there should be more expense categories. For example I see nothing about entertainment/eating out, money for hobbies, new clothes, or even self-maintenance in the budget. Another big one for a lot of people is student loans. Along those same lines, and again I know this is just an example, is that some of the figures seem low to me. The biggest one is $40/week on groceries which equates to just over $5/day or under $2 per meal. Anecdotally, it seems to me that people tend to way underestimate how much they spend on food so I wanted to point that out.
Second is that it would be awesome to have sub-categories for expenses. As an example perhaps there could be a sub-sheet for utilities which tracks gas, water, electric, sewer (whatever the case may be) where the person inputs each average monthly bill, then they are summed on that sub-sheet, and the total amount is transferred over to the master sheet. By doing this, a person may be able to have better control how much they can afford to pay extra on student loans, for example.
Overall, again, really terrific template and visually appealing!
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Just curious… why is Spotify an essential expense while Prime not?
Probably unpopular here but I use everydollar by Dave Ramsey – I found that a zero-based budget works the best for me and I haven’t lost track of a single penny in the past few months!
One tip – the new 2020 W4 doesn’t work with allowances anymore – rather, it will ask you to actually name a dollar amount that you want to withhold
You have FIVE different bank accounts eh? I guess that’s something I need to work on – currently just sitting on two (checking and saving).
In what checking account do you have your paychecks go into?
I would love to see one of these with more of an independent contractor bent, someone with variable and non-consistent income. I find it difficult as someone whose income is wholly as an independent contractor to plan out and budget things when it might be a couple months between paychecks, which themselves could be large or small depending on the project. Taxes are also more of a mess when you factor in 1099s and estimated tax payments as well.
Mine shows a “whole year at a glance” – monthly columns and summary columns, then income, account balance, expenses and total rows. I can spot anomalies fairly quickly then.
Before I had a home computer I implemented this with a single sheet of ruled graph paper. And I kept it to a single page in the computer.
Over the years you can life-changing events like job change, new cities, new house, people entering and leaving your household … This covid year is interesting: a 25% drop in expenses mostly from discretionary items like travel and entertainment.
How do I account for my property tax and mortgage interest credits on this spreadsheet? I was thinking of just estimating the amount and entering it in the post-tax reimbursements section on the income tab. Any better suggestions?
this looks insanely sick but i always struggle with something like this bc i do not have steady income, i am self employed in a seasonal business — how could i best use this without steady, predictable income?
WOW! I’ve been using this template for about 4 years now based on the original post you mentioned!
Will be sure to start using your new version along with some adjustments I’ve made along the way!
Thanks for posting!
Dude! Thank you so much! This must be an update because I’ve been using another sheet that looks just like it for around 2-3 years now. It helped me so much! I use it for planning for the year and YNAB for tracking.
I can’t recommend this approach enough! Pulled my wife and I way further out of debt then we thought possible in only 3 years. The thing I love the most is that you don’t have to account for every dollar you spend. It helps to give you a set savings amount on auto transfer (paying yourself first), it lays out your bills for the month so you know they will always be paid, and then finally sets aside guilt free money you can spend on everything else. It’s awesome and I can’t recommend it enough. We paid off two cars, most all credit cards, etc, and recently hit 6 months worth of savings in the bank to boot.
As for if you’re not paid a set salary, I will usually average my income for the past 3-5 months and use that figure. I also don’t use the tax part and often see that part intimidating people I try to share the budget with.
Finally, I’ll say just try it. If nothing else, it will help you visually see all the reoccurring payments you make every month and get you to take a long, hard look at whether they are worth having less flex money to spend.
This is a great resource. Thank you for sharing it.
Some feedback and suggestions:
* On the “Income” tab, the second column labelled “Pre-Tax Adjustments” should be “Post-Tax Adjustments”.
* Income tab, “Pre-Tax Adjustments” should have an explicit place to enter other common pre-tax items such as a traditional IRA, health insurance premiums, and FSA/HSA contributions. I know there is an “Other” field, but these are so common they might deserve their own fields.
Again, thank you for this.
It doesn’t look like anyone else has mentioned this but you know the 2020 W-4 doesn’t have allowances? The TCJA got rid of them.