Over the last long while i've been fleshing this out to keep track of our family budget. A few friends recently asked about it and, given the current climate in NZ, I thought someone here might find it a useful starting point. It's not fully polished and there are parts which some people might not need or find useful, but it has been invaluable for me.
Our names have been removed and numbers tweaked to make it a bit more opaque but combined with a few hours of going through bills, to see what the actual expenses each month/fortnight/whatever are, it should give you a bit of feedback on where the money is going and where you might be able to make savings.
I haven't added any comments or tips but if you have any trouble with it or upgrades I should make please let me know.
@christopher30 Multiply fortnightly by 26 to get annual and then divide by twelve for monthly. Vice versa for monthly outgoings to get the fortnightly budget allocation
@debranch This is really easy to follow and love the breakdown! If you are looking to experiment with something that is unit aware (e.g. where you can define things like weeks and easily convert inputs, calculations and variables across units etc.), Decipad is trying to solve for this. In full transparency, I am currently building at Decipad. It's still fairly early stage, but if you wanted to check it out: https://www.decipad.com/
@christopher30 I’ve just done a similar one and between me and my partner after all the standard non negotiable expenses we have about $2500 -$3000 left over per month to spend on enjoyment and savings. Next month I give birth and I’ll be on the $660 a week maternity payments before tax. I’m the bread earner in the relationship. That left over drops to $500 a month between us. Gonna be tight if anything unexpected comes up! Yikes and they want people to have lots of kids I can see why they don’t
@iithebeardii Good luck! We weren’t as fortunate to have that left over per month - hashtag mortgage, but had savings to bridge the gap during the last 6 mos of maternity leave.
@jerseychristiansuperstar Fortunately we have a pretty affordable mortgage for the next 3 years. Unfortunately we don’t have much savings as we’ve been using them up for house Reno’s. Just need to be careful now I’ve got 2 months left on full salary will try to make a small nest egg incase we run into any problems.
@iithebeardii You were supposed to have a kid with a man that could provide (take care of all your bills and his), it wasn't meant for the two income households, with the woman making the most money. Now you see why that structure doesn't work.
@christopher30 Nice. I like to rank my budget items into essential and discretionary sub totals. It means that your emergency fund could last you a whole lot longer as you know what your true essentials are ahead of time, if the shit truly hits the fan. It also helps identify early on if lifestyle creep is affecting the discretionary spend when this money could be better invested.
@christopher30 I use mybudgetpal and manually upload my statements every month or two to categorize spending (takes a bit of set up but once the rules are in place it works pretty well going forward).
I use spreadsheets every day in my job and would consider myself an advanced user, and use them for all sorts of non-job related stuff, but I couldn't see any advantage of making a spreadsheet over using an online tool for my purposes (understanding where money was being spent).
@in_jesus_i_trust In the beginning (for nearly three years) I did the same. Then the software I was using started to charge a monthly subscription and I couldn't see the benefit for me as all it was doing was telling me the same thing each month.
I knew where the money was going, how it was distributed across our expense categories, and I wanted to set up the spreadsheet to gauge how changes in our income/expenses would effect some things more or less than others. I now just do a csv file dump from the bank accounts every couple of months to ensure nothing has blown out of the budget range.
It's not rocket science but having it visualised is how my brain handles data the best.
@in_jesus_i_trust If you're interested in automatically categorizing / tagging expenses, you can try this tool: Unscatter. After you download your bank CSVs, you do a quick upload into the portal and it categorizes expenses for you, and you can add custom rules too
