First off I would like to thank everyone for the kind words. I’m very happy that you have found my spreadsheet to be helpful on your journey to becoming debt free.
As promised, here is a list of Frequently Asked Questions and my best attempt to answer them.
For questions where the answer is… “NO”, and where I have no intention to make the requested changes, I have tried to at least give you an explication as to why I have chosen to have things work the way they do.
Q1) I get paid every week and need to be able to account for months that have 5 paydays.
A) I have updated the spreadsheet to now track 5 weeks per month. All you have to do is re download the spreadsheet from the link at the top of the page.
Q2) Is there a column next to each month’s outgoings showing that the item has been paid?
A) No. {Explanation Coming}
Q3) How to I enter cents without rounding to the nearest dollar?
A) This must be a question from a Die Hard Nerd. J I was once like you so don’t be offended. I don’t recommend that you do this for a few reasons.
· Having the cents show in the cells add to the width of the sheet and adds a lot of extra visible ‘Noise’ to the sheet
· Most categories do not need them, for example most people are not going to put down $299.57 for groceries. I know what you are thinking, yea but what about all of those utilities; I don’t set the amount for those. In those instances I just round everything up to the nearest Dollar (Pound, Euro, etc). This just leaves a few extra cents per category in my checking account each payday. It still works out that I have spent everything on paper before the month begins, which is the point of doing the Allocated Spending Plan.
· If you still want to track to the nearest cents you can find out how here from Microsoft.
Q4) Do you know where a good pay down debt excel spreadsheet can be found?
A) Vertex42 has a very good debt snowball spreadsheet that you can download from here.
Q5) Can you add a page that rolls the debt section into the debt snowball?
A) No, because the debt snowball could really be its own spreadsheet. In fact you should download the debt snowball excel file from the question #4. Once you are out of debt, you will no longer need the debt snowball spreadsheet but can continue to use the Allocated Spending Plan spreadsheet. Plus I want to keep this as close to Dave’s paper form as possible.
Q6) Is there a way that we can change the names on the debit section? I would like to make it as personal as possible!
A) You can change the names all you want. All of the calculations are down based on the Cell references (A1, B7, etc). You will need to do it for every tab though. Beware: If you move the rows and columns around thought, you could run the risk of messing up the calculations.
Q7) I am having trouble saving it. It keeps saying its read only.
A) Try going to the File menu and selecting Save As..
Q8) Can you add a column to track actual expenses (vs.. planned).
A) No. For a few reasons… I don’t think of the Allocated Spending plan as a “What we would LIKE to do”, but more of a contact of “This is what we are GOING TO DO”. I will elaborate a bit.
- For categories such as mortgage, utilities, insurance payments and other standard bills, the Allocated amount is always the same as the actual amount.
- For categories where we use envelopes such as groceries, gas, entertainment, etc. When the envelopes are empty, we ‘Stop Spending Money’, again actual = planned. There have been times when we have parked one car for a day or two, while we used the car that ‘Still had gas in the tank’. There were a few paychecks where we did not give ourselves enough food money. There were a couple of days near the end when we were ‘Cleaning’ out the fridge, but we did not cheat. There have been some rare cases when we ran out of money in one envelope and had to borrow from another envelope. In these cases, we would have an emergency budget committee meeting where we were both aware of the borrowing and in agreement. This has improved our communication and helps us plan the next paycheck better, so we don’t have to borrow from other envelopes.
- This leaves us with the only other situation where we have extra money left over (actual was less than planned) in an envelope. I touch on this in the next question.
- Plus I want to keep this as close to Dave’s paper form as possible.
Q9) 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?
A) This is a great question. We have gotten this question in both of the FPU classes we have coordinated. The best way I know how to answer this is to tell you how we have handled this situation, and the answer is… “It Depends!” We will look at the category and talk about why we still have money left. A few examples are….
- If its ‘Clothes’, as in the example, we will just keep the money in the envelope, and still add to it next paycheck. We do this with clothing because in that specific category we tried to figure out how much we were going to spend a year on the family and then divided that number by 26 and putting that number in the clothes envelope. We know that we are not going to buy clothes every paycheck, but when we do, we use only the cash in the envelope and don’t go over.
- If its ‘Gas’ we will talk (there’s that communication again) and try to figure out why we are under and if we need to adjust the amount for the next pay period. Sometimes it’s because my wife did not drive as much (not driving the kids to school during spring break) but will be driving the normal amount in the upcoming paycheck. In that case we keep the budget amount the same and just apply the ‘extra’ amount to the next pay period. Sometimes we are under because the price of gas (or whatever) went down and we can lower the amount we need for the next paycheck. In this case I will lower the budgeted amount and take into account the money left in the envelope that will get used. For example if we need $200 for gas (this $200 represents the new lower amount) and we still have $30 left in the envelope, I will put $170 in the gas column. I just need to make sure I bump that back up to $200 on the next paycheck because that is the amount we are actually spending.
Q10) Where I have always struggled is the best way to record actual monthly expenditures. Do you just replace the budgeted amount with the actual during the month?
A) I only spend the amounts that I put on the spreadsheet. If you stick with what you budget, you will not have to go back and fill in the actual amount. In the event that adjustments are needed, as explained in some of the questions above. I adjust going forward, sometimes using the left over money in the envelopes sometimes bumping up the amounts for a category. By filling out the Allocated Spending plan before each paycheck we are very quickly able to adjust the amount budgeted to closely match what we are actually going to spend.
Q11) When I download the spreadsheet, it will not print. Do you have any suggestions?
Q12) Is this just an allocation sheet or is there a place/way to write in the amount you’ve budgeted for AND the amount you actually spend on a particular line item during the month?
A) This is just the Allocation Sheet. See Also Q8 and Q10
Q13) In the 3rd column of your original spreadsheet, it just shows #### in the columns when I enter my numbers. How do I change that?
A) This happens when the values in the cells are wider than the column. Check out this page to see how to adjust the column widths.
Q14) Any chance you can post your sheets for use with Apple Numbers???
A) I’m working on this. I don’t currently have a copy of Numbers but would be happy to put out a Numbers version if someone were to donate a copy of Numbers to me.
Q15) Is there one for the monthly cash flow plan? I can’t find it.
A) No, this is just the Allocated Spending Plan.
Q16) Thanks for your spreadsheet. Does it work in MS 2008 for Mac with the Visual Basic macros disabled (Mac 08 can’t use the Visual Macros)?
A) Yes it does work with MS 2008 for the Mac, but the “Copy from last month” button will not work. You will have to enter each month in by hand.
Tags: Budget
Chris;
Thank you for a great answer to our question about left-over money! Now we have another one…do you ever move the moeny left-over from one column to one that you went over on (i.e., you used a lot more gas that month)? For example: over in clothes under in gas. Keep the $ in clothes because you know school is coming!, move some from savings to bump gas for the month and then up the gas amount for next month.
We’re still in the “tweaking” stages but we’re getting there!
Thanks so much for all of your effort Chris. My husband and I (mostly me) are still working on the stop spending when the budgeted money is gone! Your spreadsheets are helping me tremendously!
Amy, I’m glad that this is helping you out. Good luck on your journey to debt freedom!
the sheet won’t copy from the previous month.
Make sure that you have macros enabled in excel. This might be turned off by excel for security reasons.
HOw do I update the spreadsheet for 2010
Thank you Chris for all your efforts and for sharing! The allocation spreadsheet looks awesome and can’t wait to use it.
I read Total Money Makeover and started searching online for a great template–yours is perfect! Thanks to this template, my husband and I are able to have a zero-based budget that enables us to live off teacher and youth pastor salaries, pay for graduate school as we go, and eliminate our undergrad debt years ahead of time. Thank you soo much for providing this!!
Are there any revisions that I need to make for 2010, or am I able to just change the dates at the top? Thanks again!!!!
You can use your current Allocated Spending Plan template - on the “setup” tab where it says ‘2009′ change it to ‘2010′ confirm the week ending dates as 1/2,1/9,1/16,1/23, and 1/30 for the 2010 year and you should be good to go - I check my months the last week of each moth to make sure all the w/e dates match.
Meant to say - no need to change dates within the ‘month’ tabs - Chris is so awesome he built in the macro!
*Fantastic* spreadsheet!! I’ll be a couple days walking around it and learning all the things you have here, and can already see how much better it is than the pitiful thing I had put together before and used for years.
I have the home study course from Dave’s site, and am working my way through it. I’ve already listened to Dave’s audio version of the book, and am highlighting my way through the rest.
Couple questions:
I get paid bi-weekly on Wednesdays, and my hubby gets paid on the 15th and 30th/end of month. Will it mess anything up to manually enter those dates into each month page? I am fairly good with Excel, but haven’t a *clue* how to put together a macro to winkle out those sorts of dates automatically.
Also, I would like to remove some of the rows for items we don’t need, like second mortgage (as an example). Will that mess up other calculations elsewhere? If so, what (or where) do I need to look to make sure that totals or something aren’t skewed by removing individual row items?
Thanks again for your great work on this!!
Vicky,
The dates at the top of each page are meant to be changed by you to match the dates that you get paid. These are not part of the macro as everyone will have different paydays each month.
You can check out one of my other posts on how to use the spreadsheet here…
http://angus65.com/dave-ramsey.....et-part-2/
To answer your question about removing rows…. Removing any rows will mess up all of the calculations of the spreadsheet and make it useless. So please don’t do that. I have thought about adding a function to hide the rows that don’t have any data in them, but have not done that yet.
–Chris
Excel has “hide” functionality. You can hide rows and/or columns with it. If you want to unhide them you would select the preceding row/column, hold down the shift key, and select the following row/column. Then right-click and select unhide.
For example, if you want to hide row 10, right click on the row number (10 in this case) and select hide. If you want to unhide it later, select row 9, hold down the shift key, and select row 11. Then right-click on the row numbers you just selected and select unhide.
I might be missing something here. I downloaded the .xls file and per the advice above, I changed the year to 2010. It did in fact change the year following the month at the top of each month spreadsheet. However, all the week headers still reference 2009 dates, and on top of that, every month tab displays January 2009 dates, e.g. 1/2, 1/9, 1/16, 1/23 and 1/30. If you look in the Fx line, it clearly shows all these dates are still from 2009.
I am using Excel 2007. Is there an easy way to change the month week dates without physically doing it myself?
B
Billy,
The dates at the top of the pages are meant to be changed by you, so they will have a 2010 date when you update them.
I like your spreadsheet….is there an example/legend….do you have a sheet already filled out….just trying to make sure I understand the numbers
Chris,
Thanks for sharing the spreadsheet. With your help we should be debt free soon. We found your site after spending HOURS trying to make our own budget.
This looks like a very good spreadsheet for the “Nerd”. There are several items (Trash, Life Ins, etc) with (chk) and (save). What is the difference? Can you explain? I can’t find anything in the FAQ that explains.
Thanks!
Mark,
After using the Spreadsheet for awhile now I have noticed that some people pay these items differently. Some have a budget savings account because these items might get paid once every 3, 6 or 12 months and some people have these items paid or drafted monthly. So I have added the extra rows to accommodate how you are paying. If the item has a (save) by it, it will be placed into the budget savings tab at the end of the workbook and it’s value is part of the totoal at the bottom of the page. If it has (Chk) then nothing special is done and it is just treated like any other line item.
Where do you put rent on your awesome spreadsheet?
Aaron,
I would put rent under the mortgage category. I know it’s not debt per say but it is the same as your housing and should be put there so the totals for %’s are calculated correctly.
I am confused about which dates to use for each month for w/e date. Using this 5 week per month = 60 weeks, so I have been deleting the date on the last week if there wasn’t an extra week.
I mean, how should I be splitting up the month? Also, my husband only gets paid once, at the end of the month. Do I need to make any alterations?
Everything else makes sense. Thanks for helping!
Stacy,
Don’t delete anything from the spreadsheet. There are literally hundreds of calculations that take all of the cells into account when adding everything up. The dates at the top of the sheet are intended for you to just put in which ever dates you get paid on. The dates don’t factor into any calculations so it really does not matter what you put in there. They are just up there for you to break down your income over (at most) 5 times per month. If you only get paid once a month then you would only fill out the first column of the sheet. Everything else would be blank.
Would love to try using your budget spreadsheet. I can’t get it downloaded. I need to unzip it - don’t I do this once it has been saved? Any suggestions? I guess I am asking how do I unzip it. I thought I saved it but then it doesn’t show up in my directory. Thanks
Wow - your spreadsheet is awesome. I love it, I just have one problem. My wife get’s payed every week and I get payed BY-weekly, so really, a month or two out of the year, I get payed 3 times, and she get’s payed 5. So, if at all, could you update it to do 8 paychecks, I could donate into your paypal if I had to - I think it would really help me, please?
Joseph,
I had a similar issue when the spreadsheet only had 4 weeks in it. I get paid every two weeks (so some months I get 3 paychecks) and my wife gets paid twice a month. So we had some months in which we received 5 paychecks. The solution was really simple. I just took one of the weeks in which we received 2 paychecks, added the totals together and put that total at the top of the sheet. If you think about it, that makes more sense anyway, as we don’t budget based on paychecks but we budget based on months and more specifically weeks.
hello,
I tried to use your excel sheet, monthly tabs look great, however, your summary sheet fomular didn’t seem to corresponde with each ind. item per tab.
just wonder,
thanks
Tammy,
Could you please be a little more specific? If you have found a bug (which you might have) I would like to get it corrected for everyone as soon as possible. What items have you noticed that have not lined up?
-Chris
I don’t have taxes taken out of my checks before I receive them and therefore, need to FIRST budget to remove a percentage for saving for payment of quarterly taxes. My wish is to show this before the giving section so that all the percentages are reflected from my NET pay. Is there a way to add a few rows before the giving section to calculate for this w/o messing up the formulas for the entire spreadsheet? Also, can figures from one month automatically transfer to following months to cut down on the amount of data entry? I know from FPU to the filling out of the spreadsheet monthly is part of the habit and communication and am fine with doing that…just wondering if there’s a way to cut down on the data entry portion.
Thank you for all of your hard work in creating this and your willingness to share it! What a blessing!!!
I am new to this cash flow planning but think your spreadsheet is just what I am looking for to help me with FPU. The paper forms are great, but I am a spreadsheet type of girl.
Could you give a little more detail on the colors, Save/Check, Christmas club, and what the totals at the bottom of the page are to represent?
THANKS!!!!
Beth, you can find instructions on how everything works on this page…
http://angus65.com/dave-ramsey.....et-part-2/
If that does not answer all of you questions please post again and I will try to give you a more direct answer.
–Chris
Chris,
How can we give back to you for all your hard work creating this form? If everyone gave a couple of dollars it would certainly not compensate you for all your time, but might allow you to take the family out for an extra date night or dinner.
A PayPal donate button added to the right column of your site certainly seems like a great way to let all of us give back to you!
Chris - from one fellow NERD to another — this is absolutely WONDERFUL!!!!! I created my own, but am not nearly as good at Excel as you! I thank you so very much for this very detailed worksheet! I’ll be replacing mine immediately! What a great job! You’ve made me one happy nerd!
Chris, I am in need of an animal section (vet, food, grooming) - is this something you could think about incorporating eventually? I also would love to remove lots of the “Debt” (that’s an awful long list there), but do not want to mess up all the formulas. Any suggestions?
Thank you again for all the work you’ve put into this!
I have tried and tried to get your spreadsheet and have had no success. I do not know what I am doing wrong. I have saved the file and then extracted from a zip program but it is still not working. I have tried with both the original and new budget spreadsheet. I am currently taking the Dave Ramsey course online and would love to use your spreadsheet.
Thanks for your help
I got it!!
This spreedsheet rocks…Should be debt free soon.
Chris,
Thanks so much for doing this! It is a major blessing to have all the work done and something that my wife and I can focus on to get our finances taken care of.
Could you please elaborate on the color scheme throughout the spreadsheet? - I have never seen Dave’s actual sheet but have only listened to him explaining them on CD. Any way you could provide a key?
and BTW… you have made this nerd very happy as well! ;o)
Chris, great spreadsheet! Unfortunately, I found major errors on the Summary page with almost everything besides the Jan column. I have updated that sheet, along with tweaking the Pay Period listing so that it shows the correct payday date at the top automatically.
I also included a Payday (day of week) in the Setup sheet (1=Monday through 7=Sunday). It will only show week 5 date on those weeks that week 5 is valid.
I made the changes in OpenOffice Calc and saved to .xls format - so it should work. I just need a way to shoot it to you.
Mark, I found the same errors in the summary page but have not yet had a chance to fix it. Can you send me a copy of the one you fixed? My email is troyadavis@sbcglobal.net
thanks
Did not find the mistakes, but if you can send me a updated copy. I would appreciate it.
Hi!
Thanks for doing this! Can you save it to Open Office for me? I(t looks all crazy when I did it. H E L P pppppp! Thanks!
At some point I downloaded a version of this file as a openoffice calc file. Now I can’t seem to find it, am I crazy.
Hey, I have a silly question and am new at this budgeting stuff… So, I got all my numbers plugged in, but my problem is that my husband and I get a paycheck each week and have bills due throughout the month… what do you do if you don’t have enough money to pay your bills until the middle/late month. I don’t want to get behind, but want to eat as well??? Any thoughts?
First of THANK YOU!!! I had made one for myself a few years back and lost the file. Thanks so that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel!
Secondly, any thoughts that this could be saved as a google doc without loosing the formatting?
Thanks again!