What are the first Steps to Creating a Budget?
1. Creating a budget that is effective generally requires an understanding of what your monthly expenses are.
- If you use a credit card, debit card, checking, or savings account for most of your purchases then you should pull your statement(s) for the last 6 months. Most online financial institutions allow you to download as CSV (comma-separated values), which can then be opened in Excel(you many need to import this into excel). If you most use cash, then I’d recommend listing out all of your monthly expense you can remember.
2. We have a few tools available to you for creating a budget.
- The first is our Excel Budget Calculator Template, this template allows you to quickly run a number of different budget scenarios. After creating a budget, you’ll have the ability to track your monthly spending budget to what you actually spent.
Excel Budget Template Overview
- Next we have an Online Budget Calculator that also allows you to run different budget scenarios, but it does NOT have the ability to track actual spend against your budget.