Using Microsoft Excel Or Google Spreadsheets to Create a Monthly Budget
Fact: tracking your spending is essential to working your way to financial freedom. Everybody knows that your best defense against financial hardship is simply knowing how much money is coming in vs. how much is going out. You need to make sure you’re making more than you’re spending.
How?
Well- you can SPEND money to budget on programs like Quicken, Pearbudget, Mint, Mvelopes, or YNAB. Many can lend you with resourceful tools that will help you keep your finances in check; however, you actually have to spend more money to employ them! Aren’t you creating a budget to save money?
Solution: Use Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets to create a monthly budget for you!
Following are some of the advantages to making Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets your official financial planner:
1. Costs Nothing - Microsoft Excel is a program that most of us own. And if you’re one of the rare people that don’t have your own copy, don’t go out and buy it! You can easily do the exact same thing the an Excel spreadsheet will do with a Google Docs spreadsheet- and that’s for free! The fact is a spreadsheet’s capabilities can do virtually everything you need them to. Most of your fancy financial software programs will cost you hundreds of dollars in the long term. Seems a little funny that you’re going to spend your money on something that is going to save it. Be resourceful; employ a spreadsheet.
2. Easy to Set up - Whether you’re using Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet, you’re not going to have a hard time setting them up. In fact, if you’ll just learn a couple of quick formulas, you’ll easily be able to make your numbers automatically add up, multiply, subtract, and divide when and where you need them to.
3. Simple - In my experience using financial budgeting software, they just aren’t that simple! The primarily one I ever bought was Quicken, and I found that it did too much. All I needed was something that I could convention/ize to build a budget that worked for me; Quicken complicated things to a point where I didn’t even intend to to employ it. It was not employr-friendly at all, and that’s what I needed when it came to a monthly personal budget. Pearbudget.com and Youneedabudget.com do a pretty good job to keep things simple and if you ever did decide to pay money for a monthly budget, that’s what I would recommend; however, using a free spreadsheet will save you the money period, and it’s just as simple to employ.
4. Fully Customizable - Why not employ a budgeting software that enables you to completely convention/ize what you need?! Choose your own colors, categories, sizes, fonts, styles, and structures to fit what you need. After all, everybody is different and one standardized budgeting software isn’t going to work for all! Fit your budget to your needs.
In conclusion, my personal recommendation when it comes to organizing your money is either a Microsoft Excel budgeting spreadsheet or a Google Docs Spreadsheet. Don’t waste your money on buying budgeting software. You’re pocket book will thank you for choosing an alternative route- budgeting for free!
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