Building and maintaining a workable personal budget is essential for anyone looking to get out of debt, stay out of debt, and figure out what kind of cash flow they have available for investments. The personal finance blog, Get Rich Slowly, recently had a post with free spreadsheets to use as personal budget sheets. I wasn’t overly fond of the offerings, but liked the idea of sharing a personal budget planner spreadsheet, so I have decided to post my own free personal budget spreadsheets in two formats, for free! I think you will find these versions to be cleaner and much more functional than the aforementioned versions.

Recently, I posted an article about how to create a personal budget, Simply your Finances with a 4-Step Personal Budget, which gave the theory behind creating an easy to use personal budget. The spreadsheets included in this post have brought theory full circle and will give you the functional tool to do it. I have also included an easy-to-follow tutorial on how to use these spreadsheets.

For the 20somethingfinance.com free Google Docs personal budget planner spreadsheet, follow this link:

20somethingfinance.com personal budget planner (Google Docs)

You’ll notice that you cannot edit this spreadsheet. In order to save and edit your own version of this spreadsheet, select ‘File’, and ‘Copy Spreadsheet’. Now you should be able to edit your own version in Google Docs. For the 20somethingfinance.com Excel or Open Office (free download) version, right click and ‘Save As’:

20somethingfinancecom-personal-budget-planner.xls

How to Use your Free Personal Budget Planner Spreadsheet

Everyone’s personal income and expense lines are going to vary slightly from what you will find in this personal budget planner. Feel free to delete and/or add in rows. However, make sure that the formulas in the ‘Total’ rows compensate for your alterations. Here is a step-by-step process for filling out your budget.

1. First, grab your W2 so that you can input all of your income rows, in the section as shown below:

2. Next, collect your credit card and bank statements to fill out your regular expenses. If you have consistent one-time expenses (i.e. auto insurance) that you only pay once per year, pro-rate (divide by 12) to get a monthly budgeted amount, and then fill out the cell for the month the expense was paid. All months in which you don’t pay that expense should have $0 posted. The expenses section is highlighted below.

3. Now, you will want to account for one-off income and expenses for each month. First, click on the tab for the corresponding month…

Now, you will want to fill out your one-time items…

Finally, add your totals on the corresponding rows (12 and 38 in the original) on the ‘Total Budget’ sheet…

And you’re done. You should really only need to update your sheet periodically as an income or expense item changes in amount, or at the end of every month as you you receive your statements. Ideally, this personal finance budget planner will allow you to predict how much cash flow you have available to spend during a given month so that you can plan throughout the year.

I would love to see any modifications of this spreadsheet, if anyone would like to share.

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