FREE Budget Template Tutorial 2025! | Works with Google Sheets, Excel, and Numbers

in this video we are going to be doing a full complete tutorial of a budget spreadsheet that works inside of Google Sheets and Excel you can actually download it as a CSV file and even use it in numbers if you have a Mac so if you want to budget and budget right this year let's get started hey I'm Justine your host of the debt-free Millennials channel here we talk about all ways to help you crush debt Achieve Financial confidence that leads to more fun and fewer payments so if you are new here every year I create a free budgeting template it's basically the same template that I've used since 2012 to pay off more than $35,000 in student loan debt and just less than 2 and2 years on a $37,000 income and since then I just continue to improve upon the sheet because it's worked so well for me and I know it's going to work so well for you if you would like to access this free template you can head over to detfree millennial.age be led to a Google drive folder in which you can access the Google sheet document let's go ahead and hop into that and I'll show you how you can access it once you open the Google sheet you're going to be led to this screen this is the first page you actually have four different sheets within this template to work with so the first sheet is all about getting you to read the instructions so I've included steps 1 through 8 which we will go over in just a second you cannot edit the master because the master is for everybody if you start editing this then everybody's going to see your numbers and we don't want that so what you're going to do if you get some sort of like request to edit access don't do that instead you're going to go to file make a copy and then you're going to label this like you know Justine's 2025 budget whatever you want and then you you save it to your own folder if you have a Gmail or a Google account this is how you do that if you do not have a Google account or you don't have a Gmail then what you're going to do is you're going to go file download and download as a Microsoft Excel file if you don't have Excel you can download as a csb file and then you can open that using numbers if you have a Mac and you want to try it out that way so there's actually three different versions of how you can access this toolkit I personally like using Google Sheets because I can access sheets from my phone and when I'm on the go I can access my budget if I need to check my numbers and see how my spending is going while I'm out and about that's how to download it the instructions are right here so that if you forget or re-watch this video on how to download and start creating copy that you can edit the way that this works is I have three sheets we have the financial inventory sheet the yearly glance sheet so this is your yearly budget and then we have your blank monthly budget template which is what your primarily going to use but we're actually going to start with the financial inventory which is step one you're going to fill out all of your financial accounts as well as your monthly income and expenses so your financial inventory is just based basically laying all of your finances out on the virtual table if you will we're going to be taking a look at how much savings debt uh Investments assets all of that good stuff what you're going to do is you're going to start with this top table might seem a little daunting but this is important what you're going to do is you're going to go back through your bank account statements your credit card statements and you're going to fill in as much as you know so for income you'll want to obviously open up your checking account and take a look at how much income you actually brought in over the last 6 months if 6 months feels like a little too exhaustive for you let's take a look at the last 3 months and at least let's get an average of that if you see this little div error right here that's because we haven't filled it out yet as you fill out the sheet let's say you made 5,000 you made 3,000 one month 5 000 again I don't know what it is for you it's going to take an average of that we want to know averages so that we can plug that into our monthly budget template next you'll want to record any fixed expenses fixed expenses are anything that you know are regular reoccurring monthly expenses typically this includes rent or a mortgage payment utilities Transportation costs cell phone internet and groceries not eating out food but food that you're actually buying at a grocery store because we know we're going to be buying that all the time this is where it could get a little tedious for you but I think it's important because we want to figure out exactly how much we're netting at the end of it alternatively I guess you could fill out your monthly budget and kind of backfill if you wanted to do the monthly budget template and backfill like the last 3 to 6 months you certainly could but let's just get a ballpark here so that we know exactly how much money is coming in and going going out discretionary expenses this includes all of the fun stuff entertainment clothing shopping restaurants eating out all of those good things this does not include savings because I want to see exactly or your debt payments because I want to see exactly how much money is left over after spending that's the point of this table the next table is the savings table so what you're going to do is you are going to list out all of your savings accounts maybe you have have an emergency fund maybe you have a vacation fund maybe you have a baby fund whatever it may be and then you're going to list what bank name it might be with so Ali Bank Capital One whatever you're going to list out your current balances maybe you don't maybe maybe you're starting from zero whatever it may be but you have the account opened and then you're going to list is this a traditional savings account is this a high yield savings account you can add that right here and then what is the interest rate that you're currently earning on it I think Ally just posted 3.85% interest earned on their High old savings accounts and then any notes about whether or not we need to figure out what to do with this particular fund then you're going to go down to debt and you're going to list all of your debts so if you have federal student loans we'll write that in there if you have maybe a credit card and it's with discover maybe this one is with nil nut your current outstanding balance maybe you have close to the amount that I had when I was working on my student loan debt um maybe you have $3,500 in credit card debt with discover you're going to list any of the minimum monthly payments that are due and then what date it's due on the fourth of every month whatever and then your interest rate 28.99% actually is what a lot of people have and then any notes maybe maybe it's 0% and it's interest free until 2028 I don't know so this is what you can start filling in next is Investments so we want to know if we're working with the 401K maybe you have a Roth IRA maybe you have a 529 plan for a child you're going to list the company is it with Fidelity Vanguard somebody else and then what is the amount balance in there and then what is the type of fund so you can hit this drop down menu and I've given you a couple of different options here index funds mutual funds is it a mix of a couple of different things what's your rate of return that's expressed in a percentage rate how much are you actually earning in this account are there any fees involved are there any notes hey this is with an old employer and I need to think about transferring that over to my new employer this year the next table um is the assets table so assets are anything of value typically this is a house or a car but it could also include things like art jewelry um maybe really expensive furniture I'm not sure so you're going to add it here you're going to list what you paid for it and what's the current market value and any notes as you're filling this in you're going to see up in the upper right hand corner this net worth table start to tally this up up assets are all of the things that you own minus liabilities all the things that you owe equals your net worth assets minus liabilities equals your net worth in simplest terms this is just to give you an idea of where you're at financially for everything that you have that's Financial inventory and that's going to inform your financial goals for the year so if we go back to the guide the step the Second Step so that was step one step two is to fill out the yearly glance sheet you're going to record an estimate of what you think you spend on in each category you can add more rows for more expenses as you need them so here I've actually already pre-filled some of this stuff for you to show you what I mean the first table up at the top is your debt table so you're going to list out all of your debts now you could include your mortgage payment up here just don't duplicate it down here because then it's going to count it twice so either include the mortgage payment here and just forget about it up at the debt table especially if you're not interested in paying off your mortgage early I would say this is the way to go this is how I have mine set up but if you do want to pay off your mortgage early then I would list it up here and leave all your budgeted items as such and then just delete this one out so again same thing you're going to do monthly payment um if the cell has a formula in it like this one does the yearly payment do not mess with it unless you want to mess with the cells and the formulas I did that on purpose so that you wouldn't have to figure out what the yearly payment is on $125 monthly minimum monthly Discover card payment so if this was like $245 then you're going to see how that yearly payment changes to you're spending $29 00 on credit card payments so you'll also see a percentage of your annual budget here list the total outstanding balance again this has a formula in it so do not change that and then what is the interest rate of that particular debt you're going to see also your total monthly income and total monthly expenses this is where you do change things I currently have it set at 6700 but maybe you make $44,000 and now we've got to adjust all of these things ideally you want your net as close to zero as possible meaning every dollar has a place and a category and a direction to go if you get a negative number it means you're overspending someplace and that's a area of focus that we need to work on if you have a positive number it means you're saving and that we have the opportunity to move that money to a direction of one of your financial goals so I'm going to keep as is just to keep this nice and simple so as I was filling this in let's say you know hypothetically you're bringing in $6,700 what I like to do is break down my budget into four major categories the first one is fixed fixed we kind of briefly discussed with finantial inventory these are the things that you have to pay for fixed expenses they typically don't change dollar amounts from month to month um this includes rent mortgage your utility cell phone bill Insurance um I put electricity here water gas was combined if you don't want that combined then all you have to do is highlight the row like this so I just clicked on the row the number double tap or right click and then insert one row above and then I can make this you know natural gas let's call it and so instead of water being 50 let's call this $25 we'll just call this water this is $25 and then all of these are have a a formula in it so if you want to just copy the formula all you have to do is highlight the one above it in the bottom right hand corner you're just going to click and drag to highlight like that merge these cells make them nice and pretty and like that so it's going to show a 0er percentage here because $25 out of an annual budget that's bringing in yearly $80,000 is like a drop in the bucket but you're going to see how this chart over on the right hand side actually has changed just a Teensy bit so this chart shows you how you've spent your money in the year we're going to see that almost 30% is going towards a rent or a mortgage payment almost 21 21% is going towards total debt payments this chart just gives you a visual breakdown of how you're spending your money and figuring out okay I'm spending 6% on groceries and toiletries I want to decrease that somehow so you can make those those choices and decisions based off of these visuals here so that's fixed next is fun fun is all that discretionary spending we talked about everything after your fixed expenses are taken care of restaurant shopping clothing haircut give pocket money which is just cash from an ATM if you still do that I mean do you do you sometimes we do fun money which I call anything like entertainment I put baseball games top golf Starbucks um dive bars that's kind of my thing that I like to spend fun money on movies video games I mean it could be whatever and I like to lump that into fund money because if I put online item for movies video games Starbucks it just gets cluttered it gets to be too much so I just put it all into one category so again instead of listing out all of your individual subscriptions I just lumped it into one certainly you could list them out one by one and then maybe having a list of like six to eight subscriptions would get you to think differently about how much you're spending on subscriptions in the year so if this was just $10 you only have one subscription subscription let's be honest we probably are spending a lot more than that so I could just change this and be like this is 110 that's probably more realistic right so you want to record everything that is discretionary spending and the fun category the third section is what I call fudge as in like oh fudge from A Christmas Story with Ralphie one of my favorite Christmas movies so this is kind of your miscellaneous your buffer category I don't know what I'm spending money on it doesn't have a home it doesn't have a category let's put it under miscellaneous I typically like to leave miscellaneous as a smaller number if you're finding that you're spending hundreds of dollars in this category that means that it needs to find a home in your budget under the fixed or fund or future which brings me to the next Point future your future category are all of your savings goals incl including things like an emergency fund down payment vacation fund a new car fund a new baby fund maybe some outside investing that you're doing outside of a 401k or any kind of employer sponsored retirement plan outside investing would include things like uh we're investing in individual stocks using Robin Hood stash Acorn we are investing after tax dollars with a Roth IRA or 529 plan that's what I mean by outside in in and that definitely could live under the future category here if you don't see it again just highlight the row insert one row above and then you're going to put outside investing and then you're going to start adding things to it okay uh this grade out section is just a reflection of the total total debt payments that you made up here at the top do not mess with this gray area in fact leave it alone don't mess with it it's got formulas in it and the reason why I added it down here is in order to make sure this chart is accurate Google Sheets likes to have all of their percentages listed together nice and neat in one column so that's a big difference from last year's template to this year I made this a little bit more succinct so that this chart was showing up accurately this is the yearly glance budget so that you can see exactly how much you're spending in each of these categories in a year the next part of this tutorial is everything to do with your monthly budget so steps 3 through 8 is figuring out how to put your monthly budget together so we're going to start with recording what we know first and if you don't know how much you're spending in a particular category we're going to do a spending audit which is step four a spending audit for uh any category that you want to put inside your budget is basically taking an average of the last 3 months of spending for that particular category this means that you're going to do kind of a find and search tool either on your bank account or inside of your credit card account and figure out okay how much am I spending on groceries for example so you're going to search for groceries or search for your retailers name that you typically frequent for groceries and you're going to start adding that up and and putting that into a spending audit and getting an average of that when you get an average of spending for a particular category it makes your budget much more realistic than guessing how much you're spending right like I oh I think I spend you know $300 on restaurants when really you're spending $700 on restaurants we need to figure that out and that means going into our financial accounts and taking a look at how much we're realistically spending in the last 3 months next you're going to add in any of your monthly debt payments which we'll go over and then at the end of each month add up all your income and expenses and put that into your spreadsheet and then you'll start planning for next month's budget being aware of any one-time expenses that are happening in the month such as a birthday or an upcoming vacation or a holiday and then what I like to do is create a new budget for each month by duplicating the previous month's budget it zero out the numbers for the actual spending this will save you a lot of time so um I've got some tips for Success here but what I want to do is I want to go over to this blank tipet and show you how it works so same setup as before all of your debts are listed up at the top the d d is due date when it's due what I like to do here is also I just take out monthly budget or I add in okay this is September monthly budget that way I know and then I'm going to Rel label this as September right and then you're going to create once you have this all filled out then you're going to create by clicking on this arrow and create a new one by duplicating it and then once you duplicate that sheet over you're going to label it October and then you'll have a nice file with every single month's budget l sit inside this one file which makes it really easy to go backwards and see in time at the end of the year okay how did I spend actually month to month so for September let's call it for example January July I don't care what it is you're going to you're going to label it as such add all of your debts in here so you know whether it's discover Chase student loans whatever and then you're going to list the due date was this is this due on the 15th every month we want to know that so that we can plan accordingly as we get our paychecks you're going to record the minimum monthly payment what you actually paid for that particular card maybe it was above the minimum maybe you didn't make the minimum you're going to record that there and then you're going to record the interest rate and the total debt owed having the debt top of mind is really going to help you figure out your budget so that you can get rid of the debt mhm the table over in the upper right hand corner is where all of your total monthly income lives so under the planned column you're going to actually record an estimate what you think you're going to bring in this is really easy for my salaried people because your paychecks are typically the same not so easy for those who are on commission or tipped base or self-employed like myself your income can fluctuate from month to month right we're going to take an average of what you are bringing home each month as a way to plan for your budget alternatively you can also budget for what you know is your lowest income month so if you fluctuate and you're in sales and you can have a $20,000 month or you can have I don't know an $88,000 month you're going to record it for the lowest month $8,000 I mean you got to be a pretty good salesperson to to bring in 8 8K in income I don't care what it is $33,000 $5,000 so you're going to add in all of that under plan I estimate between me and my partner we're bringing in $10,000 okay we always want a budget including our partner our spouse whoever is living with us and doing life with us also gets included inside of the budget when you want to record in the actual column is recording any actual pce stubs or paychecks or income deposits transfers as they occur in the month what I like to do is hit the equal sign and then I'll hit paycheck number one paycheck number two paycheck number three and paycheck number four let's call it all right two people two paychecks per we actually made $1,800 in the month not 10 so that could give us an idea of how we could plan out our budget for next month now for the actual budgeted items inside of your spreadsheet we're going to plan out okay I'm planning on spending $1,200 in our mortgage payment I'm planning on spending $80 in the cell phone $70 in Internet so on and so forth this is what we think is going to pop up things like electricity water natural gas those things we can do a spending audit to see what is the average of these types of bills and so I'm going to plan on forecasting for the average here maybe it's $150 when you actually get that bill and pay for it and again use the DD column to say okay this is due on the 20th we actually only owed $95 in electricity then you're going to record that in the actual column these are automatically going to get added added to Total monthly expenses up here in this right hand table so again if you see a formula inside do not mess with the formula unless you want to mess with the budget template I don't think you do and then you're going to see this nice net amounts start to kind of reduce as you're adding things in so you're going to add in what you're planning on spending for each of these things if there's a category that's missing again add it to your budget spreadsheet at a row which you just highlight and then you're going to have all of those core subcategories of your budget again the debt table is great out here just because I wanted to show you a percentage of how this is all shaping up for your monthly budget okay let's go over syncing funds real quick so a syncing fund is basically ongoing monthly savings for a particular category so when you spend from a syncing fund you can record it here and then as you have a running total if you have money that's left over in a particular category at the end of the month or you want to continue saving for something month over month this works really well for your regular subscriptions or uh payments throughout the year so like I do my premium for my car insurance every 6 months but I save for it monthly so I could do car insurance maybe I'm saving $60 every single month even though I'm not spending in September on car insurance I want to record that I actually saved $60 on car insurance and then that's going to update my running total if you see these grade out numbers here that's where I've included a syncing fund syncing funds work really well for things like shopping clothing haircuts you're probably not getting a haircut every single month but I know I get mine cut every 4 months and every 4 months it's roughly $60 so let's say 60 / 4 so I need to be saving $15 $15 gets saved when I go to actually spend money from a particular syncing fund I'm going to record it from here spent from syncing funds let's say it was $15 and then what I'm going to do here is I am going to then transfer that money typically when I'm saving money for a singing fund I'm moving it from a checking account to a savings account but what I want to do is when I transfer it back it's going to be marked as total income from syncing funds so then I'm just going to add it here under actual as income even though it's a transfer I'm going to mark it as income so that I can see that it did not affect my budget right $15 and now I've got zero left in this particular syncing fund that's how syncing funds work in this nice little spreadsheet let's move over to the pre-tax paycheck contributions so if you are interested in recording how much money the government is taking from your paycheck this is a great way to do it and get yourself all ticked off but pre-tax paycheck contributions are separate from your budget because these are things that are taken out of your check before you receive the check right so any of your deductions you can get from your last pay stub so let's say you have a health savings account you're contributing uh $60 per paycheck per month that's $120 you're going to get the year-to-date contributions from your pay stub maybe you're paying for disability insurance and that's $20 maybe you're paying for dental insurance and oh my God it's $70 you're going to continue to record things retirement is the 401K contributions or 403b so this is where you can include all right I'm putting $300 aside for my 401k this gives you an idea of how many deductions are taken from your paycheck so that when you go to things like open enrollment for health insurance and you figured out you're paying $450 $900 in the month you might want to consider switching plans next up is the notes section I noticed some of my one-on-one coaching clients were adding notes to their budget spreadsheet so I said why not include this so at the start of the month maybe you want to be thinking okay start of December I really need to increase um my Christmas budget for December right um I have my mom's birthday um we need to start looking at 529 plans whatever it may be at the end of the month you can record any notes of challenges obstacles things that maybe were unexpected you know got a flat tire pulled from emergency fund and then next month what are we going to do for next month okay so th that's just a way to use the notes section just to give you an idea of where to put your thoughts where to record maybe some of your financial goals that you're thinking about and adding it all into your monthly budget template once this is all filled out and you've recorded all of your transactions for the month then you can start making plans and making some decisions on how you want to better your finances for the next month the tips for Success are kind of the things that I've already explained so just an explanation of some of the columns what some of the titles mean so that you can go over again if you are confused about syncing funds or you're like I don't even want to use sinking funds that's just m just ignore them cuz they're not going to mess with your actual template you can just use plan and actual and that would save you plenty of time I worked really hard to just make this a little bit more simplified and easier to interpret your financial numbers inside of this Google sheet for this year so if you're interested in bettering your finances doing it with a free tool that works inside of Google Sheets Excel uh numbers one of those three apps then you can download my free budget toolkit linked below or head over to debt freemen decom toolkit to sign up for free let me know in the comments how you are working this and I will catch you in the next one [Music]