Creating a Budget

One of the best things you can do with Google Sheets is to create a simple budget. Start with listing what you need to know. First, you need to know how much you are bringing in each month. For this case, we'll assume that you are bringing home $2500 per month after taxes, Social Security and health insurance. So, now that you know how much you are making, what do you need to do next? Well, because we are smart, we're going to save 10% of our income ($250) and invest it. Think of this as paying your future self. We'll talk more about this later. For now, lets just save 10%. Next we'll need to list our expenses. Since you probably don't have any expenses now, you have a chance to make decisions about how you'd like to live. Start out with the major expenses of your life, rent/mortgage and auto expense. At this point we won't go into the wisdom of renting over mortgage or buying a car over leasing one or vice versa. Lets just list the major expenses assuming that you are living alone with no children. Feel free to adjust these numbers to fit your personal lifestyle.

Rent/Mortgage $600
Auto Expense $300
Groceries $250
Utilities $300
Clothes/Shoes $200
Gas $200
Entertainment $200
Taxes $100
Insurance $200
Cell Phone $70
Haircare $40
Misc $50

Now, you'll need to enter this data in a spreadsheet. Here is a sample of what you'll need to do.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YhZPrvfx4Z9w_O92OVZJ3vtXn8-5yF5C5kn4qCCRgr4/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

Here are a few tips:

1. To calculate your net take home pay, subtract the saving amount from $2500. 
2. Calculate your total expenses by adding up the entire expense column. in this case the formula is =SUM (B7:B18)
3. Subtract the total expense cell from the net takehome cell to see if you are in budget. If you aren't, adjust your expenses to stay within you budget.

Place your Budget spreadsheet in your spreadsheets folder.