Thank goodness someone made a video for explaining this template. I really appreciate you Michael for taking the time out and putting effort to explain how this works. I have learned a life skill in a short amount of time. Thanks to you! 💝
thank you so much for this, as a 33 year old millennial starting my first business and who studied philosophy - I can't tell you how helpful this is, in a practical and grounding way. I suppose I should have learned basic finance earlier. But as the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now. 🤟😁
So much info in a relatively short video. Thank you! For someone who has always experienced a mental block with spreadsheets, this video made me excited about befriending the essential tool. Thank you!!
This was outstanding. I recently retired because where I worked for 30 years closed. I am not old enough to collect social security and am living on savings, which I will have to be extra careful with to make it last for the next few years. This is a huge help, and I've downloaded the mobile app, too. Thank you so much.
So I'm 66 years old and for the first time ever this is a computer based budget tutorial I can actually follow. I am retiring sometime in the next two years and need to actually track my finances in detail for the first time ever. I have always done OK just generally knowing what is going on with my finances up to now but times are changing. I love this video!
This video is awesome! I have been putting off budgeting for a long time because I was always intimidated by the process - but you've made everything so clear and straightforward with the template! Thank you so much, Michael!
Thank You! This was exactly what I needed to simplify our budget. I am not comfortable with this type of thing but your video was perfect! Great explanation and detail without unnecessary talking.
This is amazing! I came to RU-vid searching for tutorials because I looked at the Google budgeting spreadsheets and had no idea how to even get started with them. I am so glad I found this video - I'm all set up and ready for the month. Thank you!!!
Really excellent video. My wife and I toggled back and forth between your video and our budget in google sheets. Thansk for doing this. Very much appreciated
Thank you very much!! I'm looking forward to starting 2024 with a vision and a plan to follow in order to stop procrastinating and finally achieve my goals!
Dude- This was so incredibly helpful! Thank you so very much! I have literally never budgeted before so thank you so so so much! Give yourself a raise my friend!
Man! You are awesome! I was miserable with how I was tracking my expenses. Belive it or not, in a .txt file LOL. This is so great. Thank you for a hundred times.
Thank you for this clear and simple explanation of how to track money and budgeting. As most of them have stated I also had trouble using mobile apps to keep track of my money and cannot get a clear overview. Thank you again for explaining this clearly I am yet to try this out and it seems it's very simple with also having the ability to record with the phone which I did not know much about until you explained. Seems everything can be recorded and transferred to other sheets automatically. Great work! Thanks a lot for taking your time to explain this to us
I tried using the budget template on my own and was unsuccessful...couldn't figure it out. Your video is an excellent tool to get this started. Thank you!!
This is super super helpful!! I also have my transactions upload automatically by using an IFTT tie-in from my banking app to google sheets, which adds a row to the spreadsheet every time I use my card :)
First, this was so helpful! I have a question about fixed expenses that are not monthly… and where/how you recommend tracking those and planning for them. I guess it’s similar to others’ questions about how to save up and track accruing money.. or rolling over leftover money.
My Google sheets budget comes with numbers in the "actual" column and when I go to edit it just has a formula. I can't figure out how to correct it but maybe I can just delete those rows. This video is great! I'm gonna continue watching now 😊
I'm not sure if someone has mentioned this before but if you control+select both the Summary tab and the Transaction tab and then duplicate, you can have more Summary/Transactions sets' for other months that will work independently of the original one but still within the same document.
This is a good tutorial. I only have a few things I would do differently. Number one is the groceries. I rarely just buy groceries when i go to the store. I'll buy food and things like trash bags or dish soap. So doing it your way, i'd have to go through the receipt and separate out the groceries. On mine I just put a Household Shopping tab and that includes anything I buy for the household like groceries or soap or tin foil or toilet paper. I also don't like what you did with the "fixed expenses" since utilities tend to be different each month and I want to be able to record them all individually in the transactions tab. I want to see the electric, water, cell phone, Netflix separately not combined into one category where I can't see how much each are individually so I can tell if one is higher than I want it to be or if I need to cut the netflix a few months or something.
Hello Michael, would you be able to explain how to add in if you are putting money into a savings account each month for a specific event/trip/etc.. Right now I have them just as a transaction with their own category but it still shows that I am spending that money each month rather than saving and I just keep track of the savings on a different tab. BUT I would love it if there was a way to incorporate that into the summary sheet without having another sheet to track. TIA!
Thanks for the awesome and clear tutorial. This will make things so much easier! Do you have any suggestions for how to sort the expense and income line items (transactions page) by date automatically? I can see things getting out of order quickly, and having them arranged by date would make cross-checking with bank statements much easier. Thanks again!
Love this video but what about annual expenses that are fixed? currently, i calculate them down to a monthly amount and add them to fixed expenses. is there a better way?
I zero it out because I don't use it. But you could use it if you wanted to roughly track your net worth? I do that with the Mint and Personal Capital apps.
Hi, thank you for the informative video, it helps me alot. One quick question, what does "starting balance" on the summary mean? And do I need to keep it 0 monthly? thank you for helping
Hi, first of all, thank you for this video!! My partner and I have set up our own with our limited knowledge of google sheets/excel and we are shifting to the one youve showed! Took me 15 minutes to get it all done w your tutorial. Love it. However, I have a few queries if you dont mind sharing the way of doing it: 1. Is it possible to have two transaction tab with only one summary? (One transaction tab for each of us however we would like our summary to be combined) - i tried to copy the transaction tab however the functions dont connect to the summary tab like the first transaction tab. 2. How do I have a continuous system on month to month basis? Meaning, any balances are carried forward to next month’s ‘automatically’? Or needs manual transfer still? Btw, would really appreciate more series like this for intermediate and advanced! Or elaboration or more detailed system of the beginner one. Love it! Thanks, Illy
To answer your first question, you could create separate categories for each person. Lunch money person 1. Lunch money person 2. I don’t know another way. As for question 2, I get this a lot but that’s what I use Empower for. I only use this template for monthly expense tracking. I will look into it.
Thanks for the video! How do you track savings? Is it first deducted from the Expense side and then added to the Income side? In your example, I see you have a deduction for transfer to savings, but I didn't see an entry on the income side. I want to make sure I'm doing it right. Also, is your starting balance whatever is left over from the previous month, if any, correct? Thanks, I like this! I've struck BUDGET GOLD!
I just use it as a monthly expense tracker. I use Mint and Empower to track net worth over time, which is why I don't have fields for balances of my checking and savings accounts anywhere. However, you can use the spreadsheet to track money over time or play around with the annual budget version in Google Sheets. Let's say you decide to use the starting balance field -- enter whatever money you have in your bank accounts. Then, do the budget as normal for the month to track expenses. Then, adjust the starting balance for the following month based on how much you were over/under the previous month.
If you use the income side, definitely have paychecks. But you can add other income and I would recommend that. Even things like bank account interest on your savings count as income! If you need more rows, you add them the same way as I showed for expenses.
Is there an easy way to see how much you spend in each “category”? Is there a way to do a final summary of expenses from each category? Not sure if that makes sense.
Hello Michael! Thank you very much for teaching us about this free Google Spreadsheet. I had a question about what the "opening balance" that is inserted in cell L8 would be. I'm still lost on this concept, could you explain it better and give an example?
I don't use that field (I think I mentioned in the video, but maybe not.) I guess you could use it as a starting balance for the month. For me, I blank it out and just log transactions with this spreadsheet.
Did you restart when you moved to the web? I have a written tutorial here: michaelsaves.com/budgeting/google-sheets-budget-template/ If you start over and still have trouble, I will retest. I have done this probably 100 times over the years for people. Usually they figure it out the second time. But it’s always possible Google changed something.
This has been very helpful, thank you! I just have a question, if anyone knows. Why put fixed expenses as part of planned expenses? It just adds my total fixed expenses to my itemized expenses which doubles things under Planned Totals. I feel like I must be missing something?
Thanks for this video, very useful! I do have a question though about the use of the "Savings" option in the income page. I do keep running into the issue when i have automated transfers from my chequing to my savings accounts or contributions into RRSP or TFSA. As they actually reduce the "free to use" amount of money it shows it should go onto the expense side, but i am also still having the money myself so also on the income side? but then they do seem to balance each other out which is not what i believe should happen? HELP PLEASE :D
I do all the setup on a computer and only track expenses from my phone with the Google Sheets app. The app doesn’t look exactly the same as the spreadsheet on a computer.
This is a great video. My only problem is my income doesn't automatically populate into the summary sheet the way the expenses do when I enter them into the transactions sheet. Is there a way to fix this?
Hello! What happens for the next month if there is left over money. For example if your budget was $500 for groceries, and you only spent $400. Also hows about if you are saving $100 a month for a future expense, how can you use this budget to track?
I appreciate this. Instead of making a copy of the whole sheet for every month, will this work if i just add a new sheet for everyone month? I would rather have every month in one file and possibly add a savings sheet and end of year sheet letting me know when i went over budget as well as how much i actually saved. If anyone knows if this is possible while still using the same format please let me know. I do like this budget and the few edits you made, just not a fan of having 12 different files.
Yes! You can control+select both the Summary tab and the Transaction tab and then select duplicate. This will make it so the new set works independently from the original but still within the same document.
Awesome video. I was intimidated by budgeting because I was unsure how to go about it but this has been a tremendous help. I downloaded the app and this has been an excellent tool to have and has not only simplified my budget but made it easy to stick to it.
