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.

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