Budget Worksheets: Set Up Your Personal Budget and Manage Your Household Finances

Budget worksheets are useful tools to help you manage your household finances. You don't need an accountant or even a computer to create a budget worksheet, the bare minimum required is a pencil and paper.

However, if you have a computer, you do have a number of software options that can help with your budget planning. A number of low cost household budget programs are available for purchase online, but you may well have something suitable on your computer already. Any spreadsheet program (e.g. MS Excel or the MS Works spreadsheet function) can be used to create a household budget worksheet. You only need very basic spreadsheet knowledge to set up a worksheet. As long as you can get the spreadsheet to add and subtract figures, you can create budget worksheets.

If you're not sure how the worksheet should look, enter "household budget planning worksheet" into any search engine, to find a sample budget worksheet layout to download.

Your monthly household budget worksheet will cover two areas: income and expenses.

In the income section, list each of your sources of income and calculate the total value for the month.

The expenses section is slightly more complicated to set up. The simplest approach is probably to list your regular monthly expenses, first, and then try to work out your other expenses for the month.

Creating a budget immediately makes clear where you are spending your money. A traditional formula suggests that you shouldn't spend more than a quarter of your net income on living costs. However, if your job takes you to an area where housing costs are high, you'll probably have to compromise and reduce your expenses in other areas to balance your higher mortgage or rent payments.

One figure that is often omitted from household budget worksheets (perhaps not surprisingly) is unforeseen expenses. Accidents happen, opportunities arise and you will want to be able to cover these and other expenses in your budget, even if you can't plan for them specifically. One way to estimate this figure is to total your non-routine expenses from the previous year and then divide that amount by twelve to get a monthly budget figure. Although not perfect, this method will at least ensure that your budget will cover some emergencies.