Monthly Budget Worksheet

What comes in, what goes out, and what is left at the end of the month. Enter each line however you are actually paid or billed — every two weeks, twice a month, monthly, or once a year — and it is shown as a monthly figure. This is the intake form we use to start a coaching session, and it prints to a PDF.

Everything here is a month

One month is the unit a budget conversation runs in, and it is the unit you already think in. So every figure on this page is monthly, including the ones you did not enter that way.

For money going out there are two choices: Monthly, or Yearly. Anything that arrives quarterly or twice a year goes in as its yearly total — four water bills, two insurance premiums — because the useful question is not how often it arrives, it is whether you can pay it out of the month it turns up in.

The envelope, for the bills that only come once

Mark a line Yearly and it is shown at a twelfth of its cost. Car insurance at $2,640 a year reads as $220 a month, every month, whether or not it is due. Those rows are marked in the list, and the total is called out underneath: the amount to put aside each month to have it ready.

Which is the part worth actually doing. That $220 is already counted as spent, but unlike the mortgage it has nowhere to go on the day — so it sits in checking, looks like spare money, and gets used. Then the renewal arrives and there is nothing behind it.

There are two ways to fix that, and they are the same idea wearing different clothes.

Move the money

A separate savings account, one transfer a month, left alone
The old envelope method, with a bank account standing in for the envelope
The more obvious of the two, because the money is physically elsewhere
One account for all of it is fine to start with

Track it where it sits

A tracker that rolls unused category money forward, with no transfer
Give the category $220 a month and it carries the unspent balance on
Nothing moves, but nothing is available either
This is what envelope budgeting means in an app

It is not savings. It is next year's bills, arriving early.

Whichever you pick, the balance sitting there is already spoken for. Most of the tools worth using handle the second version, and we have written up the ones we tried and what stuck.

What tends not to work is leaving it in checking as an undifferentiated number and intending to remember. Nothing about an insurance renewal is a surprise; the only surprise is the balance when it arrives.

Budget on two paychecks, not two and a bit

Paid every two weeks? This counts that as two checks a month. Strictly there are 26 a year, which is a fraction more than two a month — but spreading that fraction across twelve months inflates every month by money that is not there in ten of them.

Budgeting on two is the conservative version and the more useful one. Two months a year then arrive with a third check in them, and because you have not spent it in advance, it is genuinely spare — the cleanest money you will ever find for a credit card balance or a thin emergency fund.

Worth knowing which two months those are before they arrive, because an unplanned extra check gets absorbed. The paycheck calendar will tell you, for both earners if you are paid on opposite weeks.

Two categories worth explaining

Insurance is premiums — auto, home, life, health. Medical is what care actually costs you: copays, prescriptions, the dentist. They are separated because one is fixed and contractual and the other is not, and they get cut in completely different ways. Putting a car insurance premium under Transportation hides it inside a number you were going to skim past.

No Questions is each person's own money, spent on whatever they like, with no justification owed to anybody. It is a real line rather than a joke: where every small purchase needs a conversation first, budgets tend to get abandoned rather than followed. If you use it, a line each usually works better than one shared one, and the amounts do not need to match.

Three ways the arithmetic goes wrong

These are the ones worth guarding against, and they are the same three that wreck a ninety-day margin calculation.

Don't: Count credit card spending twice
If groceries go on a card, the purchase is on the card statement and the payment to that card is on your checking statement. Count both and you have doubled your grocery bill. Pick one side — counting what you spent is more useful, because it tells you where the money went. In which case the only thing that belongs under Debt Payment is interest and the part of the minimum paying down an old balance, not this month's new spending.
Don't: Treat moving money as spending it
A transfer from checking into savings has not left your household. Enter it under Savings, where it counts as a plan rather than a cost. It still comes out of the month's margin, which is correct — it is just not gone.
Don't: Start from what you earn
Gross pay is a number for lenders. What belongs at the top of a budget is the deposit — after tax, after insurance premiums, after the 401(k). Anything already taken out of the check should not appear again as an expense.

What the leftover number is for

The figure at the bottom is your margin, and it is the input every payoff plan needs. Put it into the debt payoff calculator as the extra you can put against a balance each month and you get a real date rather than a hope.

If it comes out at zero on purpose, that is a zero-based budget and it is a legitimate goal: not that nothing is left, but that nothing is unassigned. If it comes out negative, that gap is being filled by something — savings, a card, or a bill quietly going unpaid — and finding out which is the first useful thing this exercise does.

What this doesn't do

It is a plan, not a tracker. It will not connect to your bank or watch what you actually spend, and a budget that has never been checked against reality is a wish. Fill it in from ninety days of statements rather than from memory, which is optimistic in a very consistent direction.

It also treats every month as identical, which no year actually is. That is the deliberate trade: one comparable month is what makes a budget worth filling in at all, and the alternative — a twelve-column sheet with a different answer in every column — is the thing people abandon in February.

Printing it

Print, or save as PDF produces a clean worksheet rather than a screenshot of the form: income, expenses grouped by category, and the key figures including what to set aside each month. Yearly bills print with their real amount beside the monthly share, so the page reconciles for someone reading it who did not fill it in.

Choose Save as PDF as the destination in the print dialog. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored — the numbers stay in your browser.

If the number at the bottom is negative and you cannot see which line to cut, that is a conversation rather than a spreadsheet problem, and it is one we have most weeks. That is what the sessions are for.