Well, as you know, we're all about budgeting and being on a budget and buying on a budget and decorating on a budget and eating on a budget and i could go on and on and on...so I thought about writing about how to budget on a budget.
About a year ago, Anthony created a little handy-dandy Excel document that we now can't live without. It's a month-by-month budgeting tool that we use to help us see how much we've spent based on what we bring in every month and how much we have left to either spend or stash away in savings or towards a student loan. It always helps to see the numbers, I think. For those of you budgeters out there, here's a link to our "Bean Team Budgeter".
It's simple really. All we do is fill in the constant payments, those that stay the same every month, like health insurance, student loan payments, and our cell phone bill in the left column. (Tweak it to fit your bills.) Once you fill in numbers, a total will automatically be calculated for you thanks to Anthony's mad formula skillz. Then, you fill in variable payments made in the right column. Variable payments are those that change every month like the gas bill and groceries. Below the variables in the empty space we fill in random things like Target - $10 or Lowes - $20. Again, the total is automatically filled in. Put your monthly income in the 'income' spot and any extra money from babysitting, birthday money, or other such things in the 'extra income' spot. Expendiary income is what you have left after all of your debt is subtracted from your income. Then, for the next month, all you have to do is open another tab at the bottom of the document, label it with the current month, copy your constants over, and start all over again. This way you can have one document for each year with each month tabbed. Pretty dandy, huh? Easy, simple, and straight-forward, just like we like it. Budgeting has never been so fun! Plus, your bank account will thank you and remain in black. One reminder though - make sure to save your receipts so that you can enter them into your budgeter! I'm a bit of a maniac when it comes to saving my receipts anyway...I save every receipt for six months and file them in a little envelope in our filing cabinet where they are paperclipped together by month (maybe a little obsessive, I know) just in case I need them for something or some crazy company calls me and tells me I didn't pay for something when I did. You just never know.
Well, if you have any questions about our budgeter or budgeting, feel free to shoot us an email at beaninlove@gmail.com. We have our budget saved as an Excel document and I uploaded the one above onto Google Documents. Not being the technological geek I could be, I'm not quite sure it'll download to your computer if you want to use it so if not, let me know and I'll just email it to you! Happy Budgeting Ya'll!
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