Remember the time you got a bonus at work or maybe another unexpected income? You probably felt great, I feel great when that happens. Now let’s fast forward 30 from the time you got the bonus, what did you do with the money?
Did you invest it into something that will bring you more money, did you donate it to a charity to save the world or maybe you spent it on … stuff. Let’s face it most will have no idea.
It sure happened to me when I received my 13th salary. I spent it all without knowing on what. That was when I decided to keep a budget. I am not going to try to convince you to keep a budget, it’s your choice, but if you want to keep a budget you will find one here.
Data entry and data analytics
The personal budget model that I am presenting separates data entry and data analysis in Excel. It is the logical way to do things, I put the information in a table and then Excel shows me different reports with a few Pivot Tables.
The structure
We have the following structure:
- Dashboard: an overview of my financial situation, showing income and spending by month, and spending by category
- Income: a simple table where I put all the relevant information about the money I earned
- Expenses: the same simple table (yeah but with a different color) where I register the relevant information about how I spent my money
- Admin: the place where I edit all the categories used in data validation
The dashboard
I know that reports are a little bit eye candy, this is why I start with the dashboard, see bellow the charts that can be found here.
Expense summary
Expenses by category
Income summary
Income and expenses
This is where the data from the dashboard comes from. I made it as simple as possible, you can complicate it as much as you want.
Income
Expenses
Download
You can download the document here: Personal budget template.
What do you think?
What do you like, what can I improve?