I try to revisit my budget every six months or so, and having just wrapped up my taxes, which provide helpful totaling of where the money went last year, it was a good time to rebuild the numbers.

In the past, I’ve used Soulver for some of this, and while I still like that app, this time, I took a shot using a Google Spreadsheet.

I liked how the expense spreadsheet came out and thought there would be value in sharing a demonstration of it.

I’ve recorded a video of its creation to help those who might not be spreadsheet experts and to capture my thought process regarding cataloging expenses for future scenario experimentation.

Watch on YouTube

Video Summary

• Track each expense with a Description, Cost, and Occurrence (Monthly or Yearly).
• Mark each expense as Hard, Medium, or Soft to express the importance of this expense to you (how hard would it be to live without).
• Use bank and credit card statements to help you capture all things.
• Use a column to convert Yearly costs into a Monthly equivalent, the base time unit we work with here.
• Add a Scenario checkbox column to help you experiment with what expenses can be removed to reach your target goal.
• Utilize features like share, comments, and versioning to work with others.

Resources

• The Google Sheet from the video
• Previous blog: Budget Revisit 2022
• Previous blog: Self Employment Estimate Numbers