When it comes to budgeting and spending less, there are good months and there are bad. Some months you nail your budget or even exceed expectations, and others you will fall off the wagon. But if your aim is to reduce your expenses (or in the case below, a particular expense), what is the overall trend once the good months and bad are averaged out? When looking a a bunch of figures, it’s easy to get lost in the detail. This is where a graph can really help you understand your spending habits and whether you are achieving your goal of spending less.

We don’t have too many spending foibles, but our biggest one is takeaway food. We eat it as an “I couldn’t be bothered to cook” option, but really it is overprice, unsatisfying crap that is taking money away from things that we truly value or actually need. So it is our takeaway food expenditure that I’ve been looking at lately and I thought I would share the results to show how graphing your data can be quite revealing.

There is only one way to really get a hold of your finances, and that is to track your expenditure by writing down every cent spent and organising it into specific categories. Once you have written down all expenses for a month, you can then plot the total on a graph and get an immediate visual impression of your spending patterns and overall trend over time.

I’ve been keeping a budget for quite some time, so I have a fair bit of data to graph. I’ve kept a budget since 2005, but it was only since 2007 that I actually starting categorising our expenses more specifically. Below is a graph of our actual takeaway expenditure since the beginning of 2007 to the present day.

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Getting by on an irregular income is all about managing cash flow. When the cash flows in, you need to manage it in a way that there is enough to cover the months when the cash isn’t flowing in so freely.

When I worked in an accounting firm, I often worked with farmers on their cash flow budgets. If anyone has irregular income, it’s a farmer. Keeping a cash flow budget is one way to keep track of whether you are able to meet current and future expenses regardless of whether your income is stable or fluctuates wildly.

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While these days you can have multiple savings accounts without incurring extra fees, it’s often easier to keep all your savings in one account. But if you’re working towards a variety of savings goals, how do you keep track of your progress towards each goal?

I like to use an excel spreadsheet to allocate various savings amounts to each savings goal and monitor my progress. This sheet forms part of my budget. Below is a tutorial on creating a savings spreadsheet similar to the one that I use. This spreadsheet may seem a little complicated, but once it’s set up it is easy to use, you just plug in your numbers ever month the formulas take care of the rest. I like to update mine every time I do any online banking.

Of course, you can create a much simpler spreadsheet, or just use an exercise book and a pen, which is how I used to track my savings for years before moving to excel.

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This tutorial is a follow on from Part One where we designed a basic budget. In this tutorial, we’ll copy and paste the budget format over to create a spreadsheet for actual income and expenses and a variation spreadsheet that will show the difference between what we budget and what we actually earn/spend.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One of this tutorial.

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Excel is an awesome programme for personal budgeting. I have been using it now for 3 years. When you create your own budget yourself, you can customise it to meet your own needs and circumstances exactly.

This tutorial starts from the very beginning for those who have never met a spreadsheet before. I use Excel 2007 so if you’re using the older version of Excel, you will find the same functions in the tool bar and menu bar. If you don’t have Excel, then the free alternatives (Open Officeor Google docs) are pretty similar and this tutorial should still, I hope, be helpful.

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Tracking your expenses day to day is fundamental to knowing exactly what you’re spending your money on and how much you’re spending. Writing down all of your expenses is also the basis of a good budgeting system.

Like any habit, writing down how much you spend and on what takes a little time to remember to do.  To make the task easier, I’ve created some printable household expense worksheets that you can download.

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At this time of the year, busy at it is, there are two things that I do in preparation for the coming year. One is setting new goals, of which I’ll write more about next week, and the other is getting the household budget ready.

I get pretty excited about this task (ok, I admit I don’t get out much and find this stuff fun), because I love the hope of new beginnings and the unrealised potential of ‘next year’ (silly as that may sound – a blank spreadsheet has a lot of potential) and I love crunching the data on the past 12 months of spending.

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If you are using Excel to keep a budget and want to add a graph but don’t know how, then this tutorial will show you how. Instructions are for Excel 2007, but all the options are available to create a chart under the Insert menu in previous versions.

I have been keeping my budget in excel for four years now. Previous to that, our budget was kept in a little exercise book. Just after we first bought our house, I decided to create some graphs. It was just for fun really (I know, I need to get out more!), but what I found really surprised me. The numbers that had been staring me in the face for years suddenly jumped up and had meaning. I could see our finances for the first time. And I realised for the first time just how much of our income was going towards our mortgage.

A sheet full of numbers is great, but for an instant idea of how your finances are, you can’t beat a graph. It condenses all those numbers down into a visual representation that has immediate meaning.

For this tutorial, I’ll be using the same budget spreadsheet as I used in the loan calculations tutorial. All figures are made up. If you don’t have a budget but want to have a go, you can download this spreadsheet here.

The first thing we’ll do is create a quick pie chart of our expenses.

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This is Part Three of a three part series on using excel for loan calculations. If you haven’t already, check out Part One  and Part Two of the tutorial.

In Part One we set up a loan amortisation table, and Part Two we made some formatting adjustments and pulled out some results in a mini report. Today, we will dynamically link these results to a cash flow budget so that we can run different scenarios and see how this is going to affect our cash flow.

All results are based on the assumption that the interest rate remains fixed throughout the entire loan term and that interest is calculated monthly and payments made monthly. It does not take into account bank fees. Banks often have their own confusing ways of calculating interest, so your results may differ from theirs.

Below is an example of a cash flow budget. You will notice it’s incomplete but it gives us an idea of how this works. I’ve previously written a post on how to set a cash flow budget, but not specifically how to do it in excel, so if you would like me to write a tutorial on that, let me know.

I just pulled the numbers in the cash flow budget off the top of my head and they don’t reflect any real life information.

You will notice that I’ve left the mortgage field in the spreadsheet blank, this is where we will put in our linking formula.

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This is Part Two of a three part series on using excel for loan calculations. If you haven’t already, check out Part One of the tutorial.

All results are based on the assumption that the interest rate remains fixed throughout the entire loan term and that interest is calculated monthly and payments made monthly. It does not take into account bank fees. Note that banks can often have their own confusing way of calculating interest!

Continuing on from Part One, let’s start by putting in our extra repayment amount. We will put this in the field under our PMT data, and make it $80 per month. Because we’ve already formatted our table, the extra repayment column updates automatically as well as all the other cells in the table.

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