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Free Printable Budget Worksheets
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Get Your Free Printable Budget Worksheets
Download A Family Budget Worksheet
This site is mainly about helping people out of debt, not by suggesting expensive loans that could make things worse, but by providing free practical advice on how people can tackle their financial problems themselves. No get out of debt guide would be complete without looking at budgeting. Even if you set up a debt management plan or manage to negotiate new deals with all your creditors, you are still going to have to manage your finances differently to be able to keep up with payments and avoid getting into another debt crisis in the future. This is where learning to budget comes into its own.
Download The Free Budget Worksheet
This page is dedicated to my FREE Family Budget Worksheet. I have prepared two versions - one for UK residents and one for US residents. The currency is not crucial - you can either ignore it if you live somewhere else, or it can be easily changed if you know a little about Excel spreadsheets.
You can download the one in pounds sterling HERE, and the one in US dollars HERE. They are both simple spreadsheets that you can download and use if you have Microsoft Excel on your PC.
If you don't have Excel, then you can view it as a web page, or download it in pdf format here, print if off and complete it by hand. You will need Adobe Reader to open the pdf document, and you can download Reader free here if you do not already have it. Using the form in Excel is better because it will automatically calculate the figures you need.
When you have downloaded the Free Printable Budget Worksheet and are ready to complete your budget, please read the following guidelines to help you. The form is intended for use anywhere, but primarily for the UK and US. You may find a few things that may not be relevant or sound familiar for where you live but the principles are exactly the same. Just ignore anything that does not apply and feel free to change the names if it helps you.
Free Printable Budget Worksheets - Guidelines For Use
You will see that the form has blocks highlighted in colour. These are the only areas that you need to complete initially. The other boxes will complete themselves automatically. Take care not to enter data into any of the programmed boxes (ie the non-highlighted ones) or you will lose the automatic calculation function.
The budget form is set up for you to enter all figures as annual amounts. As everyone's expenditure includes a mixture of weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and occasional payments, there is no single way that will be easy for everything. Rather than enter lots of columns and risk making the Family Budget Worksheet confusing, I have opted to keep it as simple as possible.
Whatever way you do it will involve a certain amount of calculation, but I have chosen to enter annual figures to reduce the likelihood of any less frequent payments being forgotten. If you have payments or outgoings which are monthly, simply multiply by twelve to get your annual figure. If they are weekly, multiply by fifty two. Once you have entered all your annual expenditure, the free printable budget worksheet will calculate what that equates to on a monthly basis.
Free Printable Budget Worksheets Guide - Income
Salaries and wages ought to be fairly straightforward, unless you are self employed and your income varies from month to month. Wherever possible base your figures on what you have actually received over the last year. If your income varies, it is particularly important to make sure you take an average over a longer period.
If you are due to pay tax on any of the incomes you list, make sure you deduct an amount for tax before you enter the figures, as tax is not included as a separate expenditure.
Free Printable Budget Worksheets Guide - Expenditure
A general rule when it comes to entering expenditure figures is to be honest with yourself and err on the side of caution. Do not risk putting in an optimistically low figure for any expenditure. It is much better to find you have some money spare at the end of the process than find that you had less than you thought. You must be honest about the figures you put in, and never be tempted to enter what you think you ought to spend or what you plan to spend in an ideal world. Reality is what matters, so put in what you have actually been spending.
Take care when you are putting in credit card expenditure. Obviously the purchases you make on a credit card are going to be covered elsewhere on the list, so the credit card section is really for credit card debt. If you pay cards off in full each month, you probably do not need to put anything in this section, but if you have debt that you repay gradually each month, then that needs to go on there. Just take care that you are not counting anything twice in both the credit card section and elsewhere.
Think carefully about holiday expenditure. The total you spend should be relatively easy to identify, but think about what regular expenditure you might save on while you are away. Your normal household food, petrol or heating bills may all be reduced while you are on holiday, so you may be saving some money as well as spending some. Consider it carefully and deduct an amount from your holiday cost if appropriate.
When you have completed all the highlighted areas, go through it all again from the top and make sure you have entered everything correctly. Spreadheets such as these free printable budget worksheets do not know when you have made a mistake and adding an extra 0 here and there can give you a very unreliable result.
Free Printable Budget Worksheets Guide - The Results
When you have completed you Family Budget Worksheet, look at the all-important 'Total Surplus/Deficit' row at the bottom. This tells you if your spending is within your means, or if you have spending more than you have. An amount without a negative sign in front is great news! A figure with a negative sign, however, shows the amount by which you are currently overspending.
So now you have more idea about the exact state of your finances, you will know whether you can stop worrying of whether you need to take some action. If you have a negative figure showing, you need to take this budgeting business a stage further.
The column in the right of your Household Budget Form is for you to insert a monthly budget amount. You can see from the middle column exactly what you are spending each month now, so you need to put some figures in the budget column that will result in your total expenditure being the same or less than your income.
The free printable budget worksheet will still calculate the totals for you, so you need to play around until you have figures in there which result in the 'Total Surplus/Deficit' figure being either zero or a positive number.
Family Budget Worksheet - The Next Step
The all-important tricky part is then for you to keep a close track on your spending and making sure you do not go over budget in any area. This is where a budgeting tool can really help to make things a lot easier. It is only really by using some sort of software package that you can quickly and easily keep tabs on where you money is going and what you need to do each day to keep on budget. It is not impossible to do this without a budgeting tool, it is just a lot more difficult and time consuming.
For information and recommendations on the best packages to go for, visit the Home Budgeting Software page.
