Using spreadsheets to budget

[happytalk13]

Does anyone else use spreadsheets to budget? Any tips/suggestions? I'm new to all of this (not very good with money) and I need a good system in place. Help me, please, before I give up and go back to just spending and getting no-where!

Have a look at the Money Saving Expert budget planner. There's a review of some other examples here.

A number of us on Mumsnet use an application called You Need a Budget (YNAB). This is well worth a look but it isn't free - there is a 34 day free trial. We have a support thread here if you want to come on over and ask any questions.

Thanks tribpot

I like MSE planner - but it's getting the OH to "sync" with me in tracking spending. I tried the envelopes method for a while - didn't work. We never made it to the bank to sort out separate accounts with DDs so it all went to pot because I couldn't track what was being spent. I asked OH to keep receipts/write down what he spent but he just balked at it. I think he's still used to being single when it comes to managing finances but that relies on me being a mind-reader, which I'm not!

This YNAB looks good - does it make life easier for getting your budgeting partner to keep track of things?

I think what I'm trying to say is that he's often saying how it would be nice to have more money - and I keep saying "Darling, I've had more money in the past and not been any better off and the reason I think that is because the two people in the relationship weren't communicating on the budget, so there wasn't one" but I'm not sure he really gets it. I've looked at what we've got coming in and what we can reasonably expect to spend and I can see we've got some nice wiggle room for saving but it never happens. How can I get him to see that being exactly on the same line of the same page is the only way we're going to have control of our money rather than the other way around?

How it works for us: separate accounts for salaries, a joint one for expenditures, each put a proportion of our salaries in.
DH has a standing order for savings.
I transfer myself into various pots of savings.

YNAB can definitely help, although as with any budgeting method, to be most effective all spending needs to be recorded. It has an iPhone/Android app so you can do it whilst you're out and about, which helps.

What you can do, though, is allocate a certain amount of money (it's cash that's the problem, presumably?) to 'His Spending' and then not record any breakdown of what it's spent on. This may make it more effective overall to manage a budget, whilst not making him feel under the spotlight.

YNAB is based on the envelope method but you don't need separate physical bank accounts to do it. If you want to know how much there is to spend, you don't check the balance of an account, you check the balance of the budget.

Btw another poster has just noted YNAB is half price on Steam again at the moment.

We only use the joint account for bills. Dh is very different from me when it comes to money.

Which is why he says he doesn't know where his money goes to. As long as the bills are paid I mostly let him get on with it.

I didn't use a spreadsheet when I first cut back, I kept a spending diary for a month instead and wrote down how much everything was costing, I'd already switched to shopping at aldi, stopped buying clothes and registered with topcashback.

Once you realise that just one months sandwiches and car parking to nip to pay cheques in cost £60 you start making sandwiches & using the free side street parking quite quickly.

I second YNAB. It's a massive bargain at £14.99. It is a program based on a spreadsheet, that you can update from mobile phones, IPad, etc.

The concept is that you take the money you have and allocate it to the various budget categories (they are totally flexible and can be adjusted whenever you like). You don't allocate more money than you have, because otherwise you're playing with fantasy figures.

It really does revolutionise how you see your money, and you can both keep track perfectly seamlessly, because as you make purchases you are updating the budget.

We have a joint bills account and savings account and a spends account each.

I have a spreadsheet for monthly bills, with a seperate section for extras like car tax/mot/car service also broken down monthly, then me and DH put halves each into an account for just bills to cover these.

Then we each have a standing order into a savings account.

The rest is our individual spends, so we always know how much we have left each month for whatever we want

Is YNAB something you could set up in a spreadsheet though? I'm sure you could re

Oops! I'm sure you could replicate it :)

Hmmm...it is in the basic form. It was originally a spreadsheet before it became a programme. But, I think what really makes it amazing, rather than just useful, is the way that it syncs with devices so that everything is up to date, all the time.

YNAB is a method as much as it is a piece of software. Yes, you could write your own software to support the method but I would rather use theirs (and I used to write software).

You could give the real one a try for a month and see what you think. All the support videos are freely available, so if you want to do something similar with spreadsheets, you can do.

We use a spreadsheet in google docs or drive or whatever it's called at the moment. I have two sheets, one for money set aside in pots for the future (eg. car repairs/insurance/holidays/Christmas etc. - essentially short term savings) and one which logs transactions by category. I enter monthly payments onto the spreadhseet as soon as we get paid, regardless of the payment date - then we use the spreadsheet to check how much money we have on hand and completely ignore the bank account balance. I move a lump sum from the transaction sheet to the short term savings sheet every month and allocate it to categories. I hope that makes sense!

I really think that a spreadsheet is best, because it's free, you can customise it more easily and make it suit your needs and some banks let you download a spreadsheet version of your statements which you can use to create a spending history or balance your books. Google docs can be shared and edited by several people on different computers.

Hi, I am a corporate treasurer, I manage my money very similarly to how I manage my companies money (millions), which is on a spreadsheet, no need to pay for computer packages as long as you keep on top of your finances in the cash flow excel is a great tool. Very simply in a cash flow, cash in, different category lines for forecast / budgeting cash out, it all reconciles to your bank balance (monthly for my personal one) and each month I know how much I have left to move to savings after everything has been paid and periodically check my account to make sure I am on track with what I budgeted to spend. If you can set up as much as possible on monthly direct debit so you don't get behind on any bills.
Good luck

Dipsey that sounds like what I want but I don't know how to make a spreadsheet do the sums. I'm hopeless with spreadsheets. I can list things in the cells etc but don't know how to put the formula in to make it add things up as I go along.help.

I can help with the formula for excel, but I have to say that YNAB is much more sophisticated than that, and for £14.99 (at the moment) it's worth it.

Anyway, formulas:

If you had the following set up:

Column A: Incomings
Column B: Outgoings
Column C: Balance

Row1, Column C: Starting balance
Rows 2 and onwards: Incomings/Outgoings/Balances

To get cell C2 (The balance after you've added anything that's come into the account and deducted anything that's gone out of the account since the starting balance) to calculate, you should type in:

=SUM(C1+A2-B2)

That is saying: "Take the starting balance, add on any incomings and deduct any outgoings".

The next balance would be =SUM(C2+A3-B3), the next =SUM(C3+A4-B4) and so on. The easiest way to achieve that is to highlight the cell with the formula in it, highlight a big block of cells directly below it, then paste. It means that as you type values in to the cells on each row, it will automatically calculate what the remaining balance is.

Dipsey, reading back, I think the main difference between your method and the YNAB method is that you budget for each month and then check to ensure your money has been spent as budgeted.

With the YNAB method I use, I allocate my money, and only the money I actually have at any moment. Then I use the money as allocated (including an allocation for savings, for example). It means that I never have to check whether I am spending as planned, because it's all there right in front of me. If I want to make an unplanned spend, I have to decide which category I am going to take the money from to enable that purchase.

Yes, as tribpot says, you can try YNAB for 34 days without paying.

Thank you lougle. I wish I understood what that meant. I will try one of The ready prepared ones online.

Oh dear...I've assumed a bit too much I think.

Letters refer to the columns on the spreadsheet - if you look along the top you'll see them.

Numbers refer to rows on the spreadsheet - if you look along the side, you'll see them.

Every single cell (rectangle) in the spreadsheet has a reference code, so that the program knows which cell it's altering.

So, if you have a 5 in the 4th column and 3rd row, the cell is known as 'D3'.

It does sound like you'd need to make quite a lot of effort to create your spreadsheet, so you could try using the moneysavingexpert spreadsheet, or give the 34 day free trial of YNAB a go, depending on whether you want to budget your money at the beginning of the month and then track how you actually spent it (the spreadsheet) or use the YNAB methodology of allocating every pound a job (whether that be to be spent on an item or kept as savings) and tracking spending as you do it.

We use a spread sheet. All the income is allocated to categories each fortnight. Anything that isn't need straight away is held in a bank account but I have it's running total on the spread sheet. For example we pay gas and electricity every 3 months but I put the money away fortnightly.

We also take out in cash the following
Food money. It goes into a wallet.
DS Money. It goes into an envelop and covers his clothes or an expensive trip or just stays there until it's needed.
Petrol. This goes into the car
Spending. We each get the same amount each fortnight to spend on what we like. no receipts. no guilt if I spend mine on mags and coffee and OH buy more stuff for the bike. I think this is the single most import thing about keeping us on budget.

There's a lot of useful information here - thank you all.

I purchased YNAB (at the 14.99 price - thanks tribpot)

I love it. I've always liked the envelope method - it makes sense to me - but doing it physically always fell apart (not enough change to correctly transfer between envelopes etc etc) where as this, I don't have to rely on things like change and people helping themselves without telling me. I can see the bank account and enter the transactions accordingly and move money around too so it's flexible and easily so.

I've filled it all out - and I've got a 1 hour webinar video to watch to make sure I'm doing it correctly.

Depressingly we dont' have as much money as I'd thought we had for saving for a much needed extension - but hey, ho. Now we have some control and instead of just spending as and when.

Ooh how exciting. If you have any questions we have a thread going about YNAB here

Yay! Great news! Unfortunately finding out you don't have as much dosh as you thought is one of the features of YNAB, I'd imagine it's because you're paying off this month's credit card bill out of next month's income, which doesn't exist yet? I try to pay my cards off weekly - I don't need to do it because the spending comes out of the budget, it doesn't matter where the money physically resides. But I like to keep my accounts looking black instead of red :-)

It looks like they're doing a marathon session of trading tomorrow - the teachers are great and we're always here to help.