Hi, I'm Lauren from the Financial Diet and today we're gonna be talking about something completely riveting which is how to manage your monthly budget using Excel. So now a lot of you have been asking for how I budget my expenses in Excel and here it is.

So to start you're gonna go into Google, head over to your Sheets page, create a new Sheet, and name it. Now we're going to do this in five steps or columns. You're going to have your income and salary, you'll have your savings goals, your expenses, the due date of those expenses, and then your surplus.

First we'll start off with income. So you want to list out all your sources of income. Now if you're a freelancer or if you have side jobs this will obviously change month to month but try to keep it as organized as possible. So in the column over you want to add the numbers that correspond to each source of income and make sure that you're tracking them after tax. Then we're going to add a total cell at the bottom so you can see everything that you've brought in that month. Navigate over to the functions tab which is on the top right hand side of your screen and it kind of looks like a Greek symbol. Once you've selected the sum option from the functions tab you're good to go. Hold down the control key and select the columns so you have the total number of all of your income.

Now we're going to move on to the automatic savings portion of your budget and this is simply a percentage of your monthly income that gets portioned out to a set list of items. Now these percentages will vary for everyone depending on what their goals are and how aggressively they're saving for retirement. So for the purpose of this exercise we portioned out 20% of the monthly income to savings two different ways which is shown here.

Now we're going to move onto some simple math. Click on the cell where you want the total to appear then hit the equals sign. Note that all formulas in Excel start with an equals sign. Next select your gross income total, then hit the asterisk key which stands for multiply in Excel, and multiply it by the percentage you're saving. In this case it's 20% so you'd multiply by 0.20 to arrive at that number. See, simple math. This formula will generate the number that you need to save to meet that savings goal. Then you would repeat this formula for every savings goal you set.

Next it's time to calculate all of your monthly expenses, everything from rent, cable, water, and heating bill et cetera. You can even create a miscellaneous column that will vary a bit from month to month. Then we'll add them all up using the same sum function that we used to calculate all of your monthly income. Finally we're going to add all the due dates next to those expenses so you have a very clear picture of not only what your bills are but when they're due.

The final step is to simply calculate how much money you have left over in your budget and you can do this by creating a final cell called surplus. Hit the equals sign and select the total amount of money left over after your savings have been accounted for as well as the total amount of money paid for the expenses. This will generate the amount of money left over in your budget after you've taken everything into account.

Excel is great and once you setup your initial Sheet you can simply duplicate it for the next month's use. Simply delete all the old spending numbers and start fresh. In my Excel sheet I keep separate tabs down at the bottom for each month. Excel makes budgeting fun and easy.

So thanks for watching and don't forget to hit the subscribe button. And go to thefinancialdiet.com for more. Bye.