Get the Spreadsheet From Here
Ok so I have used my last budget spreadsheet for a year now and I had a few things that I wanted to change. Here they are. I won’t bother explaining Dave’s budget form, if you have not read my first post on this, please read the post My First Dave Spreadsheet.
My list of complaints from the first spreadsheet were (keep in mind that I’m the nerd)
Only one month at a time. I didn’t like starting each month from scratch.
As I have already described the why of this spreadsheet in by previous post, I will go into the how in this one.
Lets start off with some basic info on how each months sheets are laid out.
Click on each picture to see it full size.
This screenshot shows several different items
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Shows the total of all income for the month
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Shows Dave’s Categories and his recommended percentages for each
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Shows the percentage of total income for each category as well as the Total $$ spent in that category
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Shows the monthly total for each line item for the entire budget.
You will notice that some of the columns on the left are color coded. The colors represent the following….
Green = Cash, as in Envelope, these map to Dave’s suggested categories
Yellow = Budget Savings. These are the categories that I actually moved money from my checking account into my savings account (which needs to be tracked, more on that later)
Red = Debt = Stop! Any line in Red shows a payment to debt. Hopefully None!
White = Normal category. Nothing special down with these.
At the bottom of each monthly page you will see some totals.
In each of the numbered columns you will see the total for that pay period of the categories that I need to do something with.
- The Green row shows how much cash I need to take out of my account and put in the envelopes.
- The Yellow row shows how much money I need to transfer into my budget savings account
(I also have two other savings accounts for my mortgage escrow and my Christmas club)
- The Blue row shows how much I need to transfer for escrow savings (real estate taxes)
- The orange row show how much I need to transfer to my Christmas club account.
- The Red row shows how much of each pay period went to paying down debt (Hopefully None)
On the left you will see the total for the month for each of the colored categories.
Budget Savings
What is Budget Savings?
Budget Savings is a separate savings account that I transfer money to for items that I don’t have to pay every month but I have money set aside for every month. An good example of this is Car Insurance. I pay ~ $300 every 3 months for car insurance. So I have my monthly budget set up to take $50 out of every paycheck and transfer that to my budget savings account. So I will put $100 into this account in January, February and March and then move $300 back to checking when I write the check. When I do that, I will put $300 in the red area of the budget savings sheet for car insurance of that particular month.
On the “Budget Savings” sheet listed after “Dec” you will see the amounts for each budget category transferred from each of the monthly sheets.
There are few things to look at on this sheet. The first is the at the very top of the sheet where you will enter in any carry over savings for each category that you have at the start of the year. These numbers are used to calculate totals for the categories as you add and remove money throughout the year.
As you scroll down the Budget Savings sheet you will see that the category sections are repeated for each month. The total in that category is the sum of the total for that category at the end of the previous month plus any additions for that month (listed in green) minus any subtractions for that month (listed in red).
The green section is automatically filled in for you from the respective monthly sheet, which is why there are 4 columns, one for each week.
The red section needs to be filled in by you as you pull money out of that category. As you can see from the screen shot at the right, there was a $150 car repair in the 4th week of February. You will notice that at the end of January “Car Repairs” had $250. Then after removing $150 in February, there was $100 remaining.
Summary
The very last tab is the “Summary” page. This page looks very much like the individual monthly pages. The main difference is instead of having 4 columns representing the 4 weeks per month, there are 12 columns representing each month.
The “Total” column works just like it does on the monthly sheets but now you can see what you have spent on that category year to date.
Also the percentages work just like the monthly ones but for the whole year.
The Setup Tab
The very first Tab is called “Setup” all you need to do on this tab is enter the year for the budget. This will make sure that the dates at the top of each month is correct.
Ok so onto the download… in a minute….
I have actually gone through 3 revisions of this excel sheet.
In the first revision I simply had the 12 blank months listed. By blank I mean no data or references to other months (although the Budget Savings and Summery did pull data from monthly sheets). But me being as lazy as I am thought that this was a waste of time with data entry, because most of the data from month to month was the same. So I figured I could improve on it….
Which brings me to the the second revision. In the second revision I set up each month to pull it’s data from the previous month. By doing this I got some benefits and some drawbacks. The befits was reduced data entry. If I updated my Gas budget in March from $125 to $150 , then April would be updated to $150 and so would each of the reaming months. Then in April if I update Gas again to $175 then May would be updated to $175 as well as the other remaining months and so on… The problem with this approach is that I threw off my Summary tab a lot (because the whole year was filled out in January) and it threw off the Budget Savings tab a little (because it would calculate all of the months) but this is not that big of a deal as the Budget Savings tab has totals for each month and I just had to know that all future moths data was bogus (not very clean for my taste). So I figured I could improve on it….
Which brings my to the Third revision. This is the version available for download. In this version I have a button at the top of each month (except January) that copies the data from the previous month, so I get the benefit of fast data entry, AND all future months still are blank, so I get the summary and budget savings tabs to look correct throughout the year.
Yippee!!!!
Not So Fast!.
There is one draw back. The third revision requires that Macros be enabled. This is not a real big deal but with so many people afraid of viruses, they may have macros disabled. You don’t have to have macros enabled to use this file, if you don’t you will just have to manually enter the data for each month. No Biggie. As part of giving back to the community I have post the source code for the macro on this blog and you can view it here angus65.com/development/excel-budget-vba-code/
The Excel File can be downloaded from here
Thanks for stopping by.
Tags: Budget, Dave Ramsey, Finances, FPU
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I have downloaded the spreadsheet and am having trouble opening in the Excel program. It gives methe message ” invalid file name”. Is there a way to load it without having any problems?
The file is zipped up to make the download smaller. You will need to unzip it first and then open the .xls file inside.
Thanks so much for providing this! We just bought Dave’s Total Money Makeover book and workbook. We’re actually going to be setting our first budget this week which is a bit intimidating. I printed out the forms from his website. I’ll do it on paper for the first month or so as you recommended in an earlier post, then we’ll use your file for the rest of the year. Thanks for saving us a lot of work trying to make our own spreadsheet. Ours wouldn’t have been so detailed or automated.
Thanks so much for sharing! I’m sure you know financial problems are such a huge reason families are broken. These problems can be avoided or mended with this information. God bless!
Thanks for the awesome excel project. I did notice that “Christmas Club” at the end of each month is miss-spelled as “Christmans Club”. No biggie but thought i’d let you know
Danny
Chris,
Thanks for doing this. I was working on my own tonight and stumbled across yours looking for some info on Dave’s site.
A couple of suggestions for you. 1) a column next to each month’s outgoings showing that the item has been paid. 2) a page that rolls the debt section into the debt snowball. I am going to try to modify yours to see if I can get what i want out of it but I am an average Excel user, so we shall see.
Thanks!
i was wondering if you could help me modify this spreadsheet for use with someone who gets paid every week on Friday’s instead of every two weeks? I am not an excel wiz so I am messing it all up…
gav
How do I add another pay period to the months? Jan 09 has five weeks and I get paid weekly. Also, where can I find the manual for your spreadsheet? I am not savy with excel. Thanks.
Great work, thank you so much. Only problem is that when I go to save it, it says its a read only file and it won’t let me save it. Any suggestions? Thanks again!
Got it… Thanks!
WOW, this is really awesome. Thanks a lot Chris! I’ve been gearing up for this budget and hope 09 is a good year. I appreciate all your work and sharing it with others. Happy New Year!
Thanks for the great spreadsheet. I’m actually having a problem making the budget allocation work since I get paid every week. To get a monthly budget total I added up each week’s salary, multiplied it by 52 then divided by 12 to get one month’s allocation. But in trying to allocate for January 2009, with only 4 weeks, there is not enough money to cover all the lines. Can anybody help me?
Thanks!
A lady at my office just showed me this and i am very exited to start using it! I have had trouble trying to keep up with quicken so this is exactly what i need. Thanks so much!
-Ian
This looks awesome, I was able to save it. Can’t wait to start using it. I attended the Dave Ramsey University sessions and it does work. I am also kinda a nerd when it come to spreadsheets and organizing. I have been working on better spreadsheets, but this really does look better. Will keep you posted. Thank you for sharing.
I echo the other users in their thanks for shing this great resource. I also, would like to ask for assistance on how to add additional income columns, as I get paid every two weeks and my wife get paid every two weeks on opposite fridays, hense we sometimes need 5 income entries for a given month. Thanks
How do I add income columns? Thanks for all the hard work!
This is so awesome!! Thanks for sharing all of your efforts with us!! If we all work together we can turn our economy around!!
Wow! I’m sure this took tons of work. Thanks for sharing! I’m almost done with Dave’s book and will be starting my first ever budget (I’m 26). This will be a great tool!
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Chris thanks for sending me the email with the link to this updated file. Thanks for the work you put into this project. It has helped us out a lot.
Chris–
This is awesome! It must have taken you forever! I have one question…is there a way that we can change the names on the the debit section? I would like to make it as personal as possible!
Thanks!!!
How to I enter cents without rounding to the nearest dollar?
CHRIS, THANK YOU FOR THIS INFORMATION. AS SOME OF THE OTHER PEOPLE I ALSO GET PAID WEEKLY, SO HOW DO YOU ADD THE 5TH INCOME COLUMN? THANKS FOR YOUR HELP
If you want a fourth version. You should put =Jan!B86 in the bills location. Then make sure the rest of the cells in that Debits column match the cells. This will allow the debits that you have to carry over to the other worksheets. To accomplish quickly make the first change, then right click on the bottom right of the cells and drag to the last cell you have a debit against. The formula will automatically update the cells with your bill names from January. Just break the formula when you want to remove bills.
For the weekly people you can copy the whole column and paste it into Column T and all the formulas come with it. For the monthly computation you will have to edit the button that controls the macros and add some information that will allow it to know about the fifth week.
I wonder why Dave’s does not offer anything even close to this. You are a wiz!!!! Thank you for your time and effort. Much appreciated. Do you know where a good pay down debt excel spreadsheet can be found???
This is the best budgeting speadsheet that I have ever used. Thank you for creating it. Unfortunately I am having trouble saving it. It keeps saying its read only.
I am new to Dave Ramsey and just created my first zero based budget. I found this spreasheet and it looks great. I’m wondering if anybody has added a column to track actual expenses (vs. planned). I work in software, but not an xls wiz!
Thank you SO much for sharing! I only have access to the Gazelle Budget for a couple more weeks and decided I needed to find a good excel spreadsheet. I’ll be surprised if I come across a better one!
Chris, Thanks for the great spreadsheet and making it easy. I started reading the Money Makeover this week and got serious about doing it for us. Even in this market, we bought a little bit more house than we should have, so budgeting is important to make sure we don’t keep going back our savings account. I see this as a tool I’ll be using weekly.
Thanks so much for creating and sharing this. I was so hoping there would be something like this “out there” so I didn’t have to recreate the wheel. I haven’t used it yet but on first glance it looks great!
This is completely up my alley - and I’m the free spirit! I’m such a visual person that this completely makes sense to me!
I have a totally random question about budgetting in general. What do you do with the money left over that you don’t spend from your budget? For example, we didn’t buy clothing last month…and have that budget item left. Does it go to savings, another category if we went over, or carry over to the next month?
Thanks again for helping make this an easier process.
Awesome spreadsheet. I took Dave’s course a few years back but have had an awful time keeping up with the monthly budgets. Thanks to you, I have given my last overdraft fee to the bank.
I do have a question though: If I change the row names, I assume I just have to go through and change them everywhere or make my own macro?
I have already thanked God for your budget and now I get to thank you. May God bless you Chris!
Great spreadsheet! However, is there away to adjust the dates? I get paid on Tuesdays not Fridays!
Thanks!
You can put adjust the dates at the top of each weekly column.
[...] using a spreadsheet that I found here. It’s a great spreadsheet that breaks every single little thing down and then rolls over the [...]
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