Download these 18+ Free Personal Budget Templates in MS Word and MS Excel format.
Whether you are going for any project or as a startup, budgeting is the lifeline for accomplishing your goals. Budget is highly important on a personal level as it keeps you on the right track and prevents you from spending more than earning. Making wise decisions is inevitable and for that, you need to calculate your total income and then create a list of monthly expenses. Once it is done, now save almost thirty percent of your income every month. This includes lots of calculations and record-keeping, which can’t be done without creating a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is known as the personal budget template.
The way it works is that you create this template or download a ready-made design from the internet and then you record each expense you make daily. After a few months, you will start seeing a pattern or shopping behavior that might or might not match your income. Instead of using credit cards and borrowing money from friends to cover expenses, you can just manage your expenditures by using this budget template. The focus of using this template is to set a certain limit of expenses, a specific figure that you want to save every month, and then make plans to use the amount in between wisely.
Free Personal Budget Templates:
Key Elements to Include in a Personal Budget Template:
- Title of the spreadsheet, i.e. personal budget template, monthly budget template, etc.
- The month of the year or week of the month for which the expenses are recorded.
- Separate categories of expenses, i.e. entertainment, groceries, traveling, etc.
- Date of each expense within separate categories.
- Opening balance of each month/week, which indicates the money you have in your account.
- All sources of income, i.e. salary, profit, bonuses, commissions, etc.
- Net income for each month/week.
- The expenses of each category are at the end of the table.
- Total expense for each week/month at the end of the sheet.
- Overall expenses for each month.
- Total savings of each month after deducting expenses from net income.
Importance and Benefits of Personal Budget Templates:
Undoubtedly money has a great deal of significance in our lives. Maybe you are not a materialistic person and you don’t give that much consideration to money, but it’s a fact that you need it to live a peaceful and comfortable life. People use different techniques and tools to control their expenses and ensure they don’t go over the budget. One of these tools is the personal budget template. It’s a spreadsheet that an individual keeps recording all of their expenses on a daily or weekly basis.
For instance, you earn $5000 every month and you have decided to save at least $800 for rainy days. This means you can spend $4200 each month on rent, groceries, entertainment, transportation, and utility bills. Therefore, budget templates are vital tools for expense record keeping in an organized way. Furthermore, at the end of a certain period, you can overview your expenditure and income as what has been spent and what is left now in the budget.
If you are spending more than you are supposed to, you can quickly judge which expenditure wasn’t necessary for the past week and how you are going to cover the difference in the next week i.e. by not making a certain expense to ensure you don’t spend from your savings.
Another important factor to consider here is that unintentionally, we make a lot of irrelevant and unnecessary expenses, i.e. going out for dinner instead of cooking at home or taking a cab instead of using the subway, etc. There are possibilities that if you record this sort of expense daily, by the end of the week you will notice what you could have saved more by not making a particular expense. On a long-term basis, this is going to help you a lot by saving more and clearing/paying off your debts on time.
