FREE Budget Template Tutorial 2026! | Works with Google Sheets, Excel, and Numbers

Tracking your money is so simple with this tool. In this tutorial, I'm going to be walking you through how to set up a monthly budget using a spreadsheet that works inside of Google Sheets, Excel, and Numbers. Did I mention it's completely free? And I'll give you insight on how to set up your monthly savings for various expenses using sinking funds, but more on that in just a minute. To access this spreadsheet for free, head to debtfreemillennials.com slash toolkit or use the link in my description box and add your name and email. You'll be added to my email list where I can send you even more tips on how to create better budget behavior and improve your finances. Okay. Once you have the spreadsheet open, the first thing that you'll want to do is you'll want to add in your planned income expenses and your debt. So we're going to head over to the total picture table and inside of this cell under planned and total monthly income, you're going to put exactly how much you think you will bring in for the month. So this could be $9,000 and if you're budgeting for you and your partner, you want to include total income for both you and your partner. If it's just you, you can put in your total monthly income under the planned section. Then we're going to toggle over to debt and then you're going to list out any outstanding debt balances that you might have. So you might have student loans, maybe you have a credit card, maybe you have a car loan. All of that needs to be listed up here at the top of the debt table. This DD also stands for due dates. So you can add in the due dates for those particular payments so that you know how they're being pulled out of every single month. So maybe discover is on the fourth, the car loan's on the fifth. Then you'll want to record what that minimum monthly payment is. This is what we know. This is the planned amount that we're going to be putting towards each of these debts. So you can look that up by going into each of those different accounts and adding in those monthly minimum payments. Maybe discover $75 and the car loan is 367 and that's going to auto populate in this gray cell note. Don't change any of the gray cells because all the gray cells have formulas already baked in them. So if you don't want to mess with the template, don't mess with the gray cells. Then you'll add in your interest rates for everything. So maybe this is 5%, maybe this is 23% and the car loan is at 7%. Then you'll want to record your total outstanding debt for each. You'll see a running total down here at the bottom. Next for your planned expenses. That's going to be broken down into four different subcategories, fixed, fun, fudge, and future. So fixed, this fixed subcategory is for any budgeted items that are things that you know you have to pay for every single month. This includes the basics such as your rent or mortgage payment, cell phone, any of your utilities. I also include groceries and any insurance premiums that you might pay in the month. So you'll go ahead and fill in each of those planned expenses. If there's anything in the fixed category that doesn't pertain to you, or maybe there's something that's missing, you can always just highlight an empty cell and add it. So maybe for you it's HOA dues and you know you pay that every single month. So that's where you can add that in. If you are missing and running out of rows, all you need to do is highlight the row where you want to add, double click or double tap and add one row above. And then you can start adding in those different categories. So here we can see how things are shaping up for our planned expenses. As you're adding all of the planned expenses, it's going to auto populate and calculate the total monthly expenses up here in the total picture. It's going to subtract that total expense amount from your monthly income and give you the net over here. Your net at the end of the month should be as close to zero as possible. This is called zero based budgeting, meaning every dollar has an assignment. If you don't give that dollar a particular assignment, then it gets spent, it gets blown or heaven forbid it gets lost somewhere and you're not really managing your money effectively. All right, so let's go on down, keep adding things in car maintenance, car insurance. Let's say we don't have renters insurance. The next section is fun. So fun, the fun subcategory is for any of the nice to haves, but they're not essential. So think of things like restaurants or shopping or clothing, getting a haircut, gifts, fun money, subscriptions, all of those things are included in the fun subcategory. If you have a gym membership, you can include, can include it on its own separate line item. I keep gym memberships separated from fixed, even though you might know this is a fixed amount that I have every single month. To me, a gym membership is not essential. You can work out from home. So I'm trying to just get you to see like, what are my basics that I absolutely need to live? And then what are the fun add ons for my discretionary spending? All of that stuff gets added here. So maybe we do a little bit of this, maybe this is $300. People can go overboard here, that's for sure. So we just want to add what we think we're going to spend on each of these things. Fun money to me includes anything like concerts, golf. We're going to some sort of event where we're just kind of blowing money because for the sake of entertainment. So you can put that in there. Subscriptions, you can add up as a total dollar amount for the month, Netflix, Spotify, Prime, any of these can now be included here as one lump sum, or you can break them out individually if you want to. Now gym membership is included. And then we go down into the third subcategory, which is fudge. Now fudge is not chocolate. Fudge is a reference to if you've ever seen a Christmas story where Ralphie is helping his dad change the flat tire on the side of the road and he goes, oh fudge, as the nuts and bolts go flying all over in the snow. This is for those moments where you've forgotten something. Maybe it's a mom's birthday or you forgot to pick up a prescription that you need to fill and it requires payment out of pocket or any kind of cushion where you've gone overboard in another category and you need to float some money to that particular expense. So you can put a hundred dollars for your miscellaneous and then every good budget includes a future subcategory. This is for all of your savings. If you don't have an emergency fund, this is where you're piling money vacation fund. If you want to save for vacation, if you want to do outside investing outside of your employer, this is where we would go ahead and add it. If you wanted to do a new car, we can add that. So see how this is all totaling up and how we can get a better picture of our planned monthly budget by taking a look at what that net amount is. So already I'm negative $186, which clues me in on, I need to remove $186 spent from my budget in order to make this work. So I may reduce shopping to 150 and maybe clothing is 200. So where am I at? Now I'm net $14, so I'm getting, I'm, I'm close to zero. I have a little money that I can float around if needed. I'd say overall, this is a pretty good planned budget for your month. Okay? So you set up the planned budget at the beginning of the month and as you're going throughout your month, making your transactions, doing your expenses, you're going to record those in the actual column. So let's say, and again, you can use the due dates column to help you out. Let's say your rent is due no later than the fifth ring, but fifth and that actually hits. So now we're going to put in $1,200 for the actual column. As you're getting paid, you're going to record actual pay stub amounts here. So you can also include cash from any items that you may be selling on like Facebook marketplace, or if you've picked up a side hustle or you're freelancing, record any of those payment stubs. So what I like to do is I like to hit the equals button and then anytime I get at that new pay stub, I'm recording it. So let's say it's $1,250 for the first one, $1,250 for the second one and so on, right? So this is how it's going to work and that's totaled up to the $5,000 take home pay. Now you can see as we've added in our pay stubs as they occur, we're also adding in those expenses as they occur. Now something like rent your cell phone electricity, that's usually one payment and then it's done. So we're going to put all those transactions in here. Make sure this is all the same color because that's going to annoy me. But for something like groceries, you're probably going to the grocery store multiple times throughout the month. And this is where I also like to hit that equal sign and then record every single grocery transaction I make throughout the month. So maybe the first time I go, it was $75. The next time is 56 and so on and so forth. You're going to record each of those transactions as they happen. So now I can go back in and see, okay, I've gone to the grocery store five different times. I've had an actual dollar amount of $450 spent out of a possible planned $500 and here's how that's impacting my overall total picture out of a $5,000 income month. I've already spent 1965. I've got $3,000 left here up at the top. With your debts, you're going to record what you actually made. So if you are putting a little bit more than the minimum monthly payment, this is where you're going to record it and you can see how that impacts the net dollar amount at the total picture. Okay, so this continues on throughout your month. You can see whether or not you are getting close to that planned budget if you're over or under. And then this is where you can take your better budget behavior to the next level with sinking funds. So sinking funds are ongoing monthly savings in which you're contributing a monthly savings amount towards a particular expense or goal. This works particularly well if you have irregular expenses that happen throughout the year, such as an annual subscription, or maybe you pay your car insurance every six months instead of monthly. Baking in those monthly savings amounts can be really, really helpful for you to navigate those months in which there are different expenses being pulled out that aren't regular. You can also use a sinking fund to build up a certain amount of money for fun. So I do this all the time for something like shopping. So if we zoom in on shopping, the plan budget was $150, but let's say you only spent $75 for the month. Well, you'd have $75 left over that you could roll into a sinking fund. Alternatively, you can also just simply say $150 is spent in my shopping category, regardless if I actually spent money in the shopping category or not. So all of that money gets pulled into your sinking fund, and it's updated here under the running total column. So here I say, if you have any money left over in the category and would like to roll it over the next month, add it to the running total. So I like to do this for things like shopping, clothing. You could do a home decor category for your fun subcategory and add it as a running total for a sinking fund. Then whenever you're actually spending money from that particular category, you'll record it under the spent under from sinking funds. So here's where you'll put that amount. So instead of saying like, oh, well, I actually spent $150, you saved the $150, but you actually spent $36 at H&M. And so that's going to be highlighted in red to denote that that's what you've spent, and it's going to be deducted from the running total. So now you know you have $114 left over. When you go to make next month's budget, you're going to carry over this $114 remaining amount, and that'll be your new starting amount. And then you're going to add the extra $150 that you're going to be saving for next month. So see how it snowballs and it makes it really effective for you to build up savings for specific categories. I also really like to do this for car insurance. I pay my car insurance every six months to take advantage of the discount. And so I'm able to get a discount, but I'm also still saving for it monthly. I'm not paying for it monthly. I'm saving for it monthly. And then when the car insurance premium comes due in six months, I have the money ready to go. Now to level this up even further, you're going to take the savings that you're putting aside in these individual sinking funds and put them in a high yield savings account so you can capitalize on the interest. If you want to look at the best high yield savings accounts and the interest rates that goes with them, check out the link below and a list of high yield savings accounts that are available to you. Okay, so you have a sinking fund in place for shopping. You can set a sinking fund in place for clothing, and now you can see how that running total has populated for you. If you want to include a sinking fund for any other category in here, you would just copy and paste that particular formula over to that particular cell. So you could do this for gifts, copy, paste, and then 120. And now that money gets added over into the gifts sinking fund. Now that you have your sinking funds in place and you're starting to play around with that, you can capture even more financial data by taking a look at the pre-tax paycheck contributions. I included this table inside of your monthly budget because a lot of people don't have the awareness of how much of their paycheck goes towards their specific deductions. So even though this is pre-tax, it's still a good idea to add in what those deduction amounts are per paycheck for things like a health savings account and different types of health insurances and how much you're setting aside towards retirement for a 401k. This is going to give you the awareness to make better financial decisions and any possible changes during open enrollment for your benefits plan. Lastly, you can add any notes to your monthly budget to make note of any different changes that are happening throughout the month. This is especially helpful if you are recording holidays, birthdays, vacations. You want to note that at the start of the month. And then at the end of the month, you can record any financial wins that you have made or maybe even any improvements that you want to make for the next month. You can record right here. Now you receive two bonus sheets with this template. So you'll get the yearly glance sheet. And this is really helpful if you want to take a look at your spending in a year's time. So you're going to record all of these different debt amounts that you might have. Your total monthly income. And then that's going to populate for you with the formula already set aside. And you can see how much you're bringing in on a yearly basis. And you can include all of those expenses on a yearly basis as well. It's going to populate that for you. And what I love about this tool is it gives you a percentage of your annual budget of what's going to what. And I've included some notes for you. Things like a rent or a mortgage ideally should be between 25 to 35 percent of your take-home pay. Now it's going to lean more towards the 35 percent. And if you live in a high cost of living area like Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, SF, all of those places usually tend to range on the 35 percent. If you're in the Midwest or you live in the South, you should be aiming closer to that 25, 30 percent. I love that because now you can see exactly where your money is going and where are the budget busters and which ones are really not a high impact. I really don't need to be concentrating on things like my electricity usage because it's only 2 percent of my annual budget. So the way that you're doing and managing your electricity right now, unless you just want to be a conscious environmentalist, respect. That's not something that's going to really overall impact your finances, but something like your rent or your mortgage, a 30 percent of your budget. If you wanted to reduce that, that could dramatically have impacts. You can also see the pie chart and how that breaks down your spending as well for a good visual. The next sheet that you're going to get is the financial inventory sheet in which you can fill out all of your savings, all of your income and fixed and discretionary expenses and total debts. Your debt table, your investment table, and any assets that you might own. As you're filling out each of these sections, it's going to populate up here what assets you have, what liabilities you have to get your net worth. This is a quick, quick snapshot of what your net worth will look like simply by having all of your financials in one sheet. Everything is ready for you to create better budget behavior by heading to debt-free millennials dot com slash toolkit to download this template for free or use the link in my description box. Then if you want the advanced level of my budget, check out this tutorial of my super budget template that unlocks even more features.