Transcription
Hello everyone. In this video, I'm going to be going over a Google Sheets demo in regards to creating a budget and just tracking your finances.
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If you are new here, my name is Laila, and I am on my debt-free journey and also my financial independence journey. And spreadsheets have been a big part of that. Personally, I use Google Sheets because I love Google everything. And also, I appreciate that it's just I can have the app for it. It's on my phone, it's on my computer, it updates in real time, it saves drafts of everything. So if you mess up, you can easily fix it and figure out what the problem is if necessary. Excel spreadsheets are obviously very similar to Google spreadsheets, but I just, I prefer the Google spreadsheets and always have. I use them for tracking my budget, for tracking my finances, for tracking my debt. Everything to do with money, I have a spreadsheet for.
And in a recent video, I shared, I showed how I track my finances. So I will link that down below if you want to see the templates that I use. I also make my templates public to you guys to to get your own copies. But I am going to share with you a demo of how to create those templates now. I really prefer for things to be simple. Before filming this video, I was doing some research on, you know, how other people manage their finances in Google spreadsheets or Excel and just how like the layout of their spreadsheets. And I absolutely hate it. I just think it's too much. Like some people have, I'll put pictures up on the screen. And no offense to anybody who does this, this is obviously, there's no offense needed to be taken, it's just personal preference. But I don't like when there's the same thing every single month, or like income over here and budget over here, expenses, fixed expenses, uh, savings here. It's just too much. Like everything is everywhere. And the color coding can help and all that stuff. But I'd like things to be very simple. I talk about that very often. And that's exactly how I created these templates. For me, it's just a lot easier to see that. And even with my clients, they tell me how much easier it is to track their finances with my spreadsheets because, because oftentimes they're either not tracking at all, or they have a spreadsheet or multiple spreadsheets that's just crazy. And it's honestly not necessary to have so much on a spreadsheet. And I like to keep it as minimal as possible. So in this video, I will share exactly how I set those up and share some of the tips and tricks that I have learned by using Google spreadsheets. I am in no way like a super pro at this, but Google spreadsheets is fairly easy. And with time, you get used to it and start learning new tips and tricks. So if you are interested, then let's get into it.
Okay, I am right on my template. So I'm actually going to edit this directly on here just because that's going to be easier. Doesn't look like anybody's on it, so that's good news. But you, if you look in my description box, you can get access to this. I will delete everything that I add to it now. So I'm basically going to show you exactly how to make something like this. And this is the actual budget that I use myself every single month. Again, I had that video where you can go watch exactly how I track my finances. So we're gonna start up here at the top with income. I like everything to kind of be in line. So I have income across the top. And we will fix the formatting in just a moment. So you can leave this as just simple income. So you would just, you know, list uh, paycheck one, paycheck two, or however it is that you get paid. That will work for some people if you don't have sinking funds or side hustles or extra income of any of any sort. But you can separate it like I have here on the left. So I will show you how we do that. So for this section, let's just say we're gonna do paycheck one. Paycheck is that one word? I guess it's one word. Uh, paycheck one and two. And this is all just examples. So obviously, I'm gonna fill this in with just random numbers. But it's kind of nice to do it as you're going if you are creating your own template. So you can see the actual numbers that apply to you and make sure everything makes sense. So first of all, to make this one box, what you would do here is merge these. That's this button up here. And then you can place it in the center. And then if you wanted to fill it in, that would be this fill button. So fill color, you can do literally whatever you want. I always have a standard gray. Or I do it for the month. So let's say just for income, we're going to keep it as green. And you can make this bold, whatever you want to do. You can italicize it if you want to. And you can also change the size and the font, whatever you whatever floats your boat. So then we can add the total. And in order to, let's fill in some numbers so you can see this actually working. So let's say paycheck one is 2000, paycheck two is another 2000. When you type it in at first, it'll just be numbers. So in order to change the format of this, you would highlight those cells and go to format, number, and change it to currency. You could also do currency rounded. I prefer everything to be the exact amount up to the penny. And then in order to take a total of this, you would take this sum. So equals sum, open parenthesis, and you highlight those two sections. You don't even have to close it out, just hit enter and it will populate the total. So you can see if this were to change, let's make this 2500 instead, it will also change that total. Again, you can make this section bold, you can change the color, whatever it is that you want to do. In order to add these boxes, you would do, you would highlight and if you want it just around the outside, you go to this borders section. So you can do every single cell, all borders, you can do outer borders. And then maybe you want this to just have its own border as well. So you can see there's different ways to do this. If you wanted to separate those two, you would do all borders, just highlight the section and determine what, what sort of lines you want around each cell.
Now, on the other hand, let's say you want to do something like this where you have your actual income coming in, but you also are pulling from your sinking funds and or are making extra income on the side. So maybe you want to separate that out. And so what we'll do is clear all this out, remove all the borders, which would be this. You clear all the borders. Okay. So let's do, I don't want to capitalize paycheck one, paycheck two. Then we're going to leave a couple of spaces because we'll, we'll total this up. So maybe you want to have a section for your side hustles. And let's say you have clients. So client one, or affiliate, let's say Amazon, Amazon affiliate. Okay. And then let's say you pulled from a personal spending sinking fund. And here's another trick. If you, you see how this is over extending into the next cell, if you just click up here, it will pop up with an arrow and just double click that, and it will automatically go to where it should be. So let's fill this in a little bit. So let's say again, paycheck one is 2000, paycheck two is 2500. From client one, you made 150. From Amazon affiliates, you made 50. And then from personal, your personal sinking fund, you pulled 100. So first of all, we can just go select all of this and change it to currency. That'll fix that. And let's call these different things. So work income total is the sum of these two. And you could even pull this down to to the next cell if you wanted to, if you have three paychecks, four paychecks, or one. Let's call this one side hustle income. Again, equals sum of these side hustles. And then other income equals sum of whatever's here. So we can bold these, we can bold this. So maybe we want to make some space between these two cells here going up and down. So highlight the section that you want to shift down. So we'll go here and insert cells, shift, shift down. So now you have some space here. And then let's say we want to shift this down, insert cells, shift down. And now we have some spacing. And so you could separate this in boxes like so, or you could just do like this. We'll put it like this. You could label these at the top if you wanted to. But since it's down here at the bottom, this is your work income total, your side hustle income total, other income. And then what you can do is an overall total. And take the sum. Do equals sum, open parenthesis of this one, comma, side hustle income, comma, other income. And hit enter. And then again, you can bold this and put some boxes around it. Okay, so that would add up the total of everything. You can literally customize this as much as you want to. You can add your colors if you want to. You can obviously go back in and add more. So let's say that you needed more space here, like you put client two, and then they give 100. So then you have to add one more section here. So you'll just highlight this and double click, insert cells, shift down. And then you have an extra space. Obviously, the, you'll, it may affect the formatting because of what was there previously. So we'll just remove the bold. And then again, 300. And you may have to edit sometimes with those changes. So you'll see here that it didn't update here. So just reset that, equals sum of those four. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and just leave it like this for now because that is, it's whatever, it's just an example. If you go to the template that I have linked down below, you can click on these calculations and see exactly what happened for those. So this is the sum of this section, and then the total between these two sections. So, so you can literally do whatever it is you want with this now. Like I said, I like to have everything stacked on top of each other. If I were to do something like this where it has a lot more with it, I would probably scoot it over to the right. So that's what we can do here. And we'll start with our, our budget. I'm going to set it up just like this. But you could also do a weekly budget tracker just by adding more columns. So we will fix the formatting in just a moment. But we will put the expense here, and then the, what we're budgeting for it, actual, and difference. So let's go ahead and merge these. So you highlight which cells you want to merge and click this merge cells button, align that in the center. And then you can change the color. So we can make this little pink color for expenses going out. And we'll make it bold. And then we'll make all of these bold. And then you can obviously make however many lines you need to going down. So I have quite a lot here for anybody to use. But we're just going to keep it really simple here. So I'm going to fill these in just with a little bit. Okay, let's say these are the only expenses you have. Obviously, this is very simple. And that would be great. But for most people, it's a lot more. So it would just continue to go down. But we're gonna keep it like this. And I'm gonna fill in this section here with just some random numbers. So this is your budget for the month, what you actually are hoping to spend, what you want to stay under, whatever, however you want to describe that. So for rent, well, I'm just going to fill these in. Okay, so now this is all filled in. As you can see, again, it's just numbers. So let's correct this to be currency. And what I'm actually going to do is extend it across and pull down. And then pull it down a little bit further. So that if I need to add more. And then also with the totals and all that, we will make sure it's just in the actual currency format. So then we can total this all up. So I'm going to add total under expense because we don't need actual numerical values there. And again, add up the sum for our budget. Equals sum, open parentheses, and select all of these. Enter. And then if you want to have the same exact formula for over here, what you do is click this. And then there's this blue box. And you will pull it to the right. And it will add up everything in this column. So if you check here in your calculation box, equals sum of K3 through K10, which is K3 through K10. And then if we check this one, it should be L3 through L10. So Google Sheets, as well as Excel, is pretty smart when it comes to things like that. Sometimes it can mess up, so you always want to double check your work. But typically, it is fine. Now, we can also do the same for difference. So you could literally pull this down or to the right, however many times you need to. But let's go ahead and set up the difference section. So in order to take the difference between what you budgeted and what you actually spent, you would just do equals budget minus actual. And sometimes the Google Sheets will pop up with a suggested autofill. And this one is actually relevant. So we would hit yes. But let me show you how to do that otherwise. So you would, let me back up. So if we want every single thing to calculate based off of that, the difference, again, you just wait until this plus sign pops up over the little square, pull down, and it will auto populate. So let's get some lines around all of this. Let's put a line around here. We'll do outlines for that one. Let's put some lines around here. And I really don't like every single cell to be separated. But we'll just do each section. Okay.
Now, on my template, you'll see that there's red color and green colors for the difference. So if you go over budget, it turns red. And if you're under budget, it is green. So I will show you how to set that up. We are gonna go, well, first of all, you need to highlight the section. So I'm gonna highlight all of this. And go to format, conditional formatting. And sometimes this thing can be a little bit wonky. But we're gonna hopefully make it work. So we're adding a first rule. And we're gonna do if it's greater than zero, it will be green. So I'm gonna keep it as this green color. Hit done. Add another rule. And this is still applying to this highlighted section. So format cells, if less than zero, and it will be that red color. Done. So it's, you always want to make sure it actually works. So let's say on groceries, we actually spent 350. It should go red. Let's say we were right on budget. Hopefully it goes white. Yep. Okay. So you actually spent 1300. This is at the end of the month is when you typically update your budget. Obviously, if you were doing a weekly tracker, then you could fill this in every week and it would update properly. But for the sake of this one and how I do it with just the simple budget, let's say your utilities were actually 175. Total for groceries, you spent 322. Food out, I'm actually going to extend this conditional formatting to be through M13. So it changes that. Like I said, this is something that you can do at the end of the month, which is what I, I typically do, except for a couple of these things. So the main thing is groceries, because that's most of my expenses are fixed. And then if I make other purchases, if I spend in personal or health and beauty or groceries, is typically where I'll do what I'm about to show you. So for this example, I showed you that I spent 322 in groceries. But let's track that a different way. So instead of adding everything up at the end of the month, let's say you want to track every single month, but you don't want to use this format because you just would rather keep things simple. But we're going to have the same idea. So every time you go to the grocery store, you want to input the amount that you did. That's exactly why I love this too, because it's on your phone. Right when you get back from the grocery store, just put it in your spreadsheet and then unpack your groceries. So we're gonna do equals sum of. And let's say the first week you spend 75.10. All right, so that's one week down. But then next week, you want to add to that. So you can just click and start entering here. You would click and do plus 65. Enter. And it will take the new total. Or you can double click this and it will pop up in the actual cell, plus 104. And there you go. This way you can keep track of how much you actually have left in your budget for that specific line item. Same goes with personal. If you wanted to track each personal item that you purchased, then you could fill it in the same way. Everything else, though, if it's like a fixed expense, I'll just fill that in with that total amount. On my template, you'll see that I like to have this section too. Income minus expenses is what that means. So I'll show you how to do that. This is how I, I keep track of how I can put how much money I can put extra to my debt. So again, this is going over into the next cell. So we're just going to click here, double tap, and it will extend it. And let's make these bold. For this, it's very simple as well. We're literally just going to take our income. So this will be the equal sign, equals your income minus expenses. So this is what you would expect to have left over at the end of the month. Now, I'm going to show you an example here where this isn't going to work. If you drag this over to the right, it's actually miscalculating because it's pulling from, I, this, this column I column when it should be pulling from here. So you can just leave it like that and change the letter to H. And it will be correct. Or you could just manually enter it the same way, H17, which is this number, minus the total. And so with that, you can see how much you have left over at the end of the month. And how much you actually have left over and put that money toward wherever you want to see it. So let's just add a line item here that you want to invest the difference, which is, you know, either it's investing, or maybe you want to put it to a credit card or your student loans or something. Let's leave some cushion. So let's say from this number, this leftover amount, you want to do 2700 invested. So 2700, enter. It'll change this. And then you will be left with 90 for the month. Uh, but let's pretend that this is what you actually spent. So you are under budget on quite a few things. So instead of 2700, you put 2800. Now, this is going to go negative. So it's, it looks like a bad thing. Obviously, but that is technically a good negative. There is no, from my understanding, there's no way to, you could, you could separate this from the conditional formatting that I had set up. But I just leave it as is. You, you kind of know in your head that this is a, you know, this section is a good thing. So you could exclude this whole area from the conditional formatting. So that it just shows up as white. Or you could change it to be green, even if you wanted to. But then you'll see, you'll still have that left over.
Another cool thing about sheets is you can add little notes if you want to. So let's say you want to keep track of what you're spending on personal spending. So you'll double click this. And it will pop up with a bunch of options. And go to insert note. And let's say you bought some running shoes and you got a t-shirt or something. And you could even put the price of everything. So like, let's say for the running shoes, it was 80 dollars. And then the t-shirt was 15. So then it will add this little triangle. And you can just hover over it. And it will pop up with what you spent your money on. This is a great way to keep track of it instead of like, you could put it down here if you wanted to and put the prices there. But it's a lot better to have just a little note section. You can keep track of where your money's going.
Now, if you do prefer to have it where you're tracking every single week, then it's basically the same idea. You're just changing the formula a little bit for this different section because you have to subtract each week. So that's what I have in this template. So you'll see here that it is taking B13, which is right here, it's taking my budget and subtracting the spending from every single week. So B13 minus C13 minus D13 minus E13 minus F13. You have to, you only have to do that once for the difference section. And then click, hover over the square and just drag it down. There are literally options for everything. As I said, this is highly customizable. If you messed up anything, you typically will just undo because you typically catch it right away. So you can just hit undo. Or you can go to your edits, which was up here. And you can see what edits happened. If you click it and expand, you'll see all the changes that you made. And it will highlight those changes. So like if we go here, it's highlighting this because that's where I made the change. So if you don't like what you did in these recent ones, you just click the more actions and then restore this version or make a copy. It is awesome how it does this. So then just to exit out of that, you go back and everything is all good. And typically, if I'm making this for the next month, I literally would just highlight everything and control C and then copy it over for the next month. And then just clear these, these things out. Now, sometimes you may like, let's say this is the copy over here, obviously. So let's say maybe for the month, the next month, you don't need anything in the personal section. So what you can do is just highlight that section, double click, delete cells, make sure you do the one with the arrow and then shift up. And that will clear that one out. So you could also add a section. Let's say you want to add underneath food out, highlight that section, double click, insert cells, shift down. So that will go above it, actually. And the formatting will be cleared out. So you'll want to make sure that this is in currency. And then to get this calculation and formatting, you would just drag that down. And it will actually work out. So again, this is not fitting in the cell. So we double click and expand that. Double click this one to expand. So there's obviously a lot of options when it comes to Google Sheets. And I, for this video, for the purpose of this video, I am just showing you how to create a budget on Google Sheets. I can go into further detail on how I created my finance tracker if that's something you're interested in. I figured I would start just with the budget. And if people would like to see everything else, maybe like the debt trackers, the finance tracker, then comment down below and let me know. This video is going to be really long though, because I just wanted to make sure I got everything in. But if I missed anything, or if you have any questions, if you're not able to fix something with the templates that I provided, or if you're making your own, then please feel free to comment down below and I will do my best to help you fix that. Otherwise, have fun with your spreadsheets. It is honestly very fun in my opinion and a great way to stay on top of your things and just make a habit out of keeping everything intact and keeping track of your finances. Hopefully that was helpful. Thank you all so much for watching and I will see you in my next video.