Whether you’re new to budgeting or have been doing it for years, these three quick steps will guide your budgeting program toward success.
Budgeting can free you from stress, confusion, and uncertainty, and give you the confidence to manage major (or even minor) life changes.
At first, budgeting seems scary, like it’s taking away your freedom. In reality, the reverse is true. Better yet, it’s surprisingly simple to make budgeting work for you.
You only need to know a few Google Sheets formulas for budgeting and personal finance to transform your spreadsheets into the ultimate tool for managing money.
Traditionally, the envelope method involves making categories for all your expenses, writing those categories on a bunch of envelopes, then putting a set amount of cash inside each envelope each paycheck. You only spend from those envelopes. When you take money out for expenses, you can see exactly how much is left.
Zero-sum budgeting means every dollar of income you bring in is accounted for. When you get your paycheck, you know exactly how much is going towards food, gas, entertainment, savings, etc. When you’re done budgeting, you have no money left over.
We’ve made budgeting in a Google Sheet even easier with the release of our new budget template. Of course powered by Tiller’s automatic daily feed of bank transactions and balances, we’ve kicked it up a notch with some awesome new features to help you budget your way.
How to budget for irregular income: Big lump sum income, followed by zero income, is familiar to contractors, freelancers and commissioned salespeople. But even those willing to adhere to a budget struggle with managing their irregular income.