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Mike Zornek

Using Google Sheets to Catalog Expenses for Budgeting Considerations

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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.

Download MP4 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

About the Author. Mike Zornek is a developer and teacher focusing on product design and development with a heavy focus on Elixir and LiveView. In between his projects, Mike helps other teams through consulting. During off hours, he enjoyed watching Phillies baseball and playing relaxing video games.

Hopefully, you found interest in my scribbles. If you have commentary or a response, I'd love to hear it.