If you are looking to start a budget spreadsheet, but don’t really know how to get started, then we have a few videos that can help you create your own personal budget.
To start, you’ll need to get yourself a spreadsheet program. We like to use OpenOffice.org as it is free and is almost identical to Microsoft Office. You can also use one of the many online spreadsheet programs including the one from Google Docs.
There are many ways that you can create a budget. The easiest way is to just list all of your expenses for a given month. However, the whole point of creating a budget is to help you manage your money, so the more organized and the more analytical the budget, the better it will work for you.
Learn How to Budget by Watching Videos
Assuming that you don’t have anything in place yet to organize your finances, you may want to start by watching this video about how to organize your expenses by using a spreadsheet. By the way, all of these videos are courtesy of Budget Ways. And if you’re interested, they have a free budget template that you can download that includes its own video on how to use it.
Specifically, this video shows you how to turn a blank spreadsheet into a checking worksheet that can be used to organize your bank accounts. The spreadsheet that it creates can be used to later create your budget. It is also a great way to balance your checkbook and to provide detailed information about your finances that you can easily locate when it’s time to complete your taxes or if you want to look up an old financial transaction quickly. Here is the video:
How to Create a Spreadsheet Of Your Financial Transactions
Once you’ve created an organized file of your checking transactions, you can almost immediately turn it into a budget by using a pivot table to transform the checking data into a summary of your income and expenses (you know, a budget). This video shows how you can make a copy of your checking worksheet and easily summarize your finances with just a few clicks of the mouse. Once you’ve done what the video shows, you’ll probably want to format your information to your own custom preferences. Here is the video:
How to Make a Budget From Your Checking Account
While the budget table that the previous video makes is not very well formatted, it does provide the necessary information that you need for your budget. If you want to create your own customized budget worksheet, then there is one more video that you can watch to help you learn how. This video starts with a blank sheet and then adds the necessary categories and totals so that you can make a customized budget template that is just for you. Here is the video:
How to Create a Budget Template From Scratch
We hope you’ve enjoyed these videos. These and other videos can be found at http://www.youtube.com/budgetways.
Have any comments? Please leave us one below.
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Thanks for these videos, it looks like it isn’t that difficult to create a budget spreadsheet then!
In terms of the software being used to make it, I’d probably suggest LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org is a bit out of date now.