A spreadsheet is an ideal way to keep a track of your household and/or personal budget. Watching income and expenses allows you to consciously control your spending and stop you from getting into trouble. In today’s challenging economic times, we need to be more penny wise than ever!

With that in mind I went looking for a spreadsheet to help track my personal expenses. After searching the internet for a few hours, I came up with only these that following.

Monthly budget sheet

This sheet allows you to arrange your personal monthly income and expenses in various categories, so everything is right there in front of you.

Categories include: Home expenses, Transportation, Health, Charity/gifts, Subscriptions, Daily living, Entertainment, Savings, and Obligations.

Everything is then summed up in a handy monthly budget summary.

Monthly sheet for 12 months

This sheet has pretty much the same categories as the previous one, but it has a table with 12 columns for the different months, so you can enter the budget of a year into one sheet.

For some reason these two sheets appear many times around the net with various small variations to their title …

Home budget

This home budget sheet has similar structure to the previous one, but separates tax-deductible expenses from non-tax-deductible expenses.

Create your own

There are really few options for ready-made solutions out there. If none of these work for you, you may wish to create your own budget and expenses sheet. Here’s an eHow article which gives instructions on exactly how to do that.

Summary

If you have any ideas or have created your own useful budget spreadsheet, please let us know. I would like to compile a list of such sheets that would benefit all the readers, so please suggest any other templates that you know about.

About the author

Yoav Ezer co-authors the technology and productivity blog Codswallop. He is also the CEO of a company that produces PDF to XLS conversion software.

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