|
Pageamonth FAQ's
Send us your Questions and Concerns. You can use the Contact page's email form if you wish. We'll try to answer them here.
Why a spreadsheet budget?
I tried Quicken, MSMoney, and other package applications before I settled on this spreadsheet budget to manage my money. I wrote it as soon as Windows 3.1 offered a spreadsheet in Works, and updated it through the years. The fact is, you can keep track of your money in any form or program, but the big commercial applications don’t show my income or expenses in the format I need.
Unlike the big, fancy financial software, with a spreadsheet I can control how everything in the program works and can understand why because I wrote the formulas. And especially I need to know my balance as each day’s income comes in and costs go out, when I spend the cash or mail the checks. I’ve never found a commercial program that does that. Most are linked to a banks and card accounts, so I don’t get a balance until transactions clear at the bank, and I never could make things balance.
I couldn’t print the standard notebook-sized 8 ½ x 11-inch pages I wanted either. That’s why I created each month’s information on just one sheet, the Twelvepage Budget.
Is this spreadsheet available in other file formats?
I wrote it originally in MSWorks as a .wks file, but have offered it on the internet as an Excel xls. file since Office is the current leading application bundled with most Windows computers. If you prefer to use it as a Works file (.wks), it is easily converted using SaveAs in the top File Menu. I still use my personal copy that way, mainly because I’m more familiar with Works behavior.
(Update: The budgets and templates are now all available in .xls and .wks.formats.)
What if I want to list more regular expense categories than the 19 spaces available?
Most regular monthly expenses are paid out to a dozen or fewer vendors, such as rent/mortgage, utilities (electric, water, phone/cellphone, cable), loans, and credit cards. I choose to treat what I pay myself (cash, savings) as regular expenses also, to get them out of my checking account balance so I can manage the rest better. If you write more than nineteen regular vendors' checks a month, this budget spreadsheet probably isn’t for you, because the space you would need to keep track of them would need to be increased, and then you’re taking it from another area to keep everything on one monthly page. You could try a smaller font and bigger sheet, but it won’t be as easy to read.
Why pay yourself cash each week?
I pay with cash, often, for convenience and to avoid niggling penny and dime credit card purchases.
Why not automate copying same regular expense through the year instead of using copy and paste? Excel has a function where you just enter it once and it appears in twelve places.
We get asked this a lot. It's true you can automate entry in multiple cells in Excel, and there's no reason not to when you're setting up a new budget. But if you set up January so it works within itself, you can then copy/paste the whole month at once through the other months' positions (i.e. create 12 "January"s), then change the month names to the right ones and you have the same result. You'll need to adjust any month's items that you expect changes in, however, afterwards, so do it for repeating, regular income and expenses only, then fill in known occasional items in the months they apply. In general, we prefer to minimize automatic cell changes and do it manually for the sake of accuracy and clarity. It's clunky, but easier than correcting mistakes made in the name of speed and simplicity. And consider this: what you automate you no longer control, and you have to check what the machine is doing.
Why pay yourself a savings account deposit the first thing each month?
I pay myself (savings deposit) at the beginning of the month to put myself first in line of people I need to pay. If I wait till the end of the month to see how much I can put in savings, I won’t have the will power. There will always be other things that come up.
Is there a certain psychology at work here?
You bet! What you don’t see you won’t miss, like your payroll deductions and withholding. Remember, you plan your budget based on your net paycheck, not your gross. Too many folks make that mistake.
|
