Super Budget Template Tutorial: The ULTIMATE Budget Spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Excel, & Numbers)

hey fam I'm so excited to share the dfm super budget template with you in this video we are going to be doing a complete walk through and tutorial of this template now if you haven't snagged the template yet please do so by visiting the link in the description box below and if you already have it open and ready well let's get started this template was designed to give you options of how you want to budget so you can use a simple template or you can use a super template that has even more data the idea behind the redesign and why I built this super budget template is because I wanted to give you more control and more data to just see what's going on inside of your finances I also included several debt and savings trackers that you'll definitely want to check out and we'll go over in just a second so when you open up your budget template for the first time in order to start editing the template and I get this question a lot actually I get a lot of emails requesting access to start editing this template this is the master you cannot edit the master or else everybody's going to see your numbers and nobody wants that so what you're going to do if you have a Google account so if you have a Gmail account you're going to click file and then make a copy you're going to copy over to your own Google Drive and then make sure that you can start editing it alternatively if you do not have a Google account you can click file download and then you can download as a Microsoft Excel sheet so really the two big things here is Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets you can also download as a CSV and plug it into uh Apple Numbers the what comes like basically Apple's version of Excel and using it in numbers so let's go ahead and take a look at this first sheet the first sheet is just giving you a step-by-step instructions of how to fill this out starting with the financial inventory sheet which has all of your numbers basically to help you organize everything then you're going to take a look at the yearly glance so figuring out how much money you're spending in the year and then we're going to take a like Choose Your Own Adventure approach you can either use the simple template or the super template the super template has more charts and features whereas the simple template gets you like straight to the point I recommend if you've never budgeted before in your entire life and you've never used a budget spreadsheet in your entire life start with a simple template if you're like I kind of know what I'm doing but I want to test something new and fun then I would go for the super template so you're going to record exactly what you know first a lot of people know how much they're paying in rent or mortgage a lot of of people don't know how much they're spending in things like restaurants or shopping when you don't know how much you're spending in one particular month that's when you're going to do a spending audit a spending audit looks at the last 3 months of spending for a particular category and then you're going to take an average of that spinning and use the average to accurately plan for that particular expense so if I thought oh I only spend $100 on restaurants but then I do my spending on it and I see I actually spend like $500 woo then I'm going to use that $500 as my plan and then we're going to challenge ourselves to back off of that $500 spending budget if we want to in order to reduce costs and do it in a realistic way then you're going to add in your debt payments and then at the end of the month you'll add up all your income and expenses into your spreadsheet and then you'll start planning for next month's budget and you can do so by duplicating the previous month's budget now I had you duplicate it because I didn't want you to be filling out the same planned information because a lot of our planned expenses don't change month to month so anytime you need to duplicate your budget so if this super budget template and what I like to do is I like to label it so I'm very clear about what month this is for I'm going to label this November monthly budget and if that's the case let's do that I also like to double click inside of the tab and then I'll put November here and then I'll fill this out for November and if I want to duplicate you click this arrow click duplicate and then you're going to get a copy with basically all the info that you've already filled out and now I'm going to make December got it all right let's go back to financial inventory this is the first sheet the Financial inventory sheet is a way to organize all areas of your money in one single sheet so the first area is just getting an idea of your monthly income over the last 6 months do you have to fill out 6 months no you could probably do 3 months especially if you're salaried and make sure you're counting your partner your significant others your spouse whatever your person that lives with you and does finances with you or should be doing finances with you include their income as well we want to see what that average looks like especially th for those who are making inconsistent paychecks next you'll want to do your fixed expenses now ideally you're going to get this from your monthly budget this is going to include any fixed recurring expenses month over month rent mortgage payment groceries food only bought at grocery stores very clear on that utilities electricity gas water trash internet cell cell phone any car related expenses or Transportation expenses if you live in an area that has really good public transport you'll want to include any kind of uh public transport pass that you pay for anytime you are using transportation to get you to and from your areas of work home anything like that so you're going to include that as fixed expenses discretionary expenses includes all the fun stuff so subscriptions restaurants clothes shopping Beauty enhancements entertainment concerts that sort of thing you may not know this and honestly if you have been budgeting for a long time this will be very quick for you to fill out getting an average of these things is really going to help you budget in a way that is realistic and natural to say okay yes I really do spend $300 on shopping so that's what I need a budget for your net should be either zero or positive number if it's a negative number it means you overspent in the month and we have to make some changes this is creating some awareness next you'll want to fill out your savings table include the bank name your current balance what type of account is it is it a high yield savings account traditional savings account what kind of interest rate what are you earning in this account if anything and any notes like what is this account for include all of those things for savings type accounts next you're going to fill out the debt table I've included a drop- down menu for you to select what type of debt you have the lender or the company name so if it's for example a credit card your lender is going to be discover and then you're going to put your current outstanding balance the minimum monthly payment due when it's due on the interest rate if any and any notes some people take on a 0% interest card but it's only available for 0% for the next 24 months as the due date of when that that term expires next you're going to add in any type of Investments the account type so is it a 401k is it a taxable brokerage account you want to add those things into your Investments who it's with is it with Vanguard is it with Fidelity add in the amounts and the type of funds that you have it could be a mix stocks bonds mutual funds any of those things your rate of return so what is that that rate of return expressed in a percentage how much are you earning inside of those Investments any fees if any and then notes Here is this with an old employer do we need to transfer this over at some point just to give you a better understanding of where all of your investment accounts are at and then lastly you're going to fill out your assets assets are any things of value so this typically is a house or cars but you might have fine jewelry or art maybe Home Furnishings that are worth a lot of money maybe it's something else entirely maybe it's an RV if that's the case if you need to add a different type you can always click the drop- down menu and then click that little pencil the edit button and then you can add another item RV done apply to all now it's listed here got it as you are adding in some of these things this is automatically going to up date for you so all of your assets the things that you own all of your liabilities the things that you owe equals your net worth assets minus your liabilities equals your net worth so now you're going to kind of get a a brief understanding of how all that works now that we have taken a look at the financial inventory sheet let's hop over to yearly glance and check that out so what you're going to do is this is basically set up like the monthly template except you're going to get an additional column that shows you what you're paying in each of these expenses in a yearly View and then also a percentage of your annual budget so you may and you can change these so if it's not $2500 that you're paying in rent or mortgage and let's say it's only $1,500 you can make those updates just make sure anytime you're making updates to the this template that your percentage of your annual budget is equal to 100 you're going to also fill out all of your debts what your monthly payment is and then it's automatically going to calculate the yearly payment so if you go up here into the formula up at the Top If you see a formula listed don't mess with that cell unless you want to mess with the formula which I don't think you do so everything's already tallied up for you I'm also going to um note down here at the bottom even though your debt table is up here at the top you're actually going to see it grade out here at the bottom again don't change this unless you want to mess with the the template at all but the reason I did that is so that all of these percentages can add up and be kind of in sequential order Google Sheets likes to do pie charts in sequential order so you're not messing up the accuracy of this chart this chart shows you how you've spent your money in the year it tells you the percentage allocations of what budget categories and how the money is being dispersed so you can see here 24% if you just hover over the chart 24% went towards debt 35.7% or 36% went towards rent or mortgage pay payment and so on so this is just another way to show you if you're a visual person to show you exactly how your money is being dispersed throughout the year let's hop over to the simple template the simple template is based on the free budget toolkit that everybody has access to so you're going to have your monthly budget and what you're going to do is you're going to add any of your debts just like that and then you're going to add your minimum monthly payment amount you're going to gather this from those entities you're going to log into your accounts and add that in what you actually paid even though your monthly minimum payment for the city card might be $24 maybe you're doing $50 okay so you're going to continue to add in these numbers as much as possible so that we get a very accurate picture of where things are your total debt is how much you owe in this particular debt so maybe you owe you know $4500 the DD right here is the due date for each debt so again in any of the monthly templates here what I like to do is I like to just say you know January budget this is my January budget and the due date for the city card I looked it up it's the 14th so now I know January 14th is when that payment is due and then when I've made that payment I can always just do a little X I can do a check mark whatever to tell me that I've already paid it you're also going to do the same thing for your different budgeted categories so the rest of this table are the main budget categories that I have listed out I find when I break it down into these four subcategories it just makes it really simple for me so I have my fixed so anything that I pay for that are bills that are recurring such as rent mortgage cell phone um electricity Gas Utilities car related expenses all of my fixed expenses that I know I'm going to pay for every single month regardless of what happens then I broke it down to a subcategory called fun so these are all the fun things all the discretionary spending so these are the nice the halves the restaurants shopping clothing if you want like hair and nails as a category you can simply just go down here and do hair and nails let's say you're big into Lego I had a client who was really big into Lego which I loved so you just see how I highlighted the row I'm doing this so fast okay highlight the row and then you're going to click insert one row above or one row below I like to do it in the middle of each section so I keep the formatting nice and pretty and then I just add Lego just like that now if you want to copy the percentage so in the gray area if you want to copy the percentage all you have to do is hover over in the lower right hand U portion of the cell and then click and drag down to copy that formula for that particular cell so then you're going to get a percentage of how much money is going towards something like Lego every single month based off of what you are bringing home so in this template I put $110,000 for your planned monthly income that's really for maybe couples who are both mid to high income earners and they're putting their paychecks together maybe yours is something different maybe it's $8,000 maybe it's $4,000 whatever it may be add that into your planned spending when you go to actually do your budget you're inside of the month of January what you're going to do is you're going to zero out the actual here you're going to see this this error come up on the percentages that's okay it'll correct itself once you add in your actuals in your actual you're going to record your actual pay stub amounts or any side hustle income that you might be earning anything from a partner that they might be bringing in what I like to do is I like to hit the equal sign and then I'm going to add in that paycheck amount plus my partner's paycheck amount plus my side hustle income as I see it coming into my checking account hit enter to let that actually sum together so that you can see how this is shaping up you can also edit it from this top formula cell right here so in the beginning of the month you're going to add what you plan on spending for each of these categories so at the end of the previous month or at the very beginning of the the month that you're budgeting for you're going to add in those things 2500 maybe this is $60 internet is $70 uh electricity we've done our spending audit where we're taking the last 3 months and averaging that our electricity bill has been averaging about $165 so again you're just going to go down the line and then put out your plan spending when you actually go to pay for those expenses and you can do this at the end of each month if you're brand new to budgeting I would be doing this multiple times a week and then you can get into a weekly Cadence after that when you go to actually make that payment and that payment has cleared then you can hit in the actual column I actually did spend $2,500 on the mortgage and oh the electricity bill was actually less it was $1 $25 this time so see how you can do that and the expenses are automatically tallied up here at the top you're going to see two additional columns here the syncing fund columns and how much you have total if you've spent from that or how much you have a syncing fund is a way where you can save monthly for different savings goals so I may have a sinking fund for let's say shopping and I want to contribute $100 every single month towards my shopping syncing fund even if I don't spend $100 in the month I still want that money to roll over to the next month so that in 5 months I have $500 saved and I can go on a mega shopping spree if I wanted to whenever you spend from those sinking funds you can make a note of it here and say okay I spent $25 notice how in this gray area where it says sinking fund total I now have a negative $25 balance and I'm actually I'm going to hit $100 here so this all evens out so I plan on sending aside $100 I actually did set aside $100 by transferring it into my savings account I spent $25 from my shopping syncing fund and now I have $75 left in my sinking fund that I can then roll over to the next month anytime you see these gray zeros in the sinking fund total that's where I suggest that you could have a sinking fund by no means are you required to I'm just giving you some ideas of how you could work this template to your benefit so that's fixed fun fudge is all of those miscellaneous things where you're like I don't really have a category for this so I'm just going to add it into this miscellaneous or buffer so typically like to do maybe like a $100 buffer in order to even out any discrepancies or weird budget categories that I don't normally have in the month future includes all of your savings goals typically this would include an emergency fund U maybe a vacation fund again the vacation fund is a great syncing fund to have I love using that as a syncing fund maybe you're saving for a new car or maybe you're doing outside investing with after tax dollars do not include any 401k or 403b contributions because those are pre-tax dollars in which that's taken out of your paycheck before you actually receive it so anytime you're doing outside investing this would include like a taxable brokerage account 529 plan a Roth IRA that would be included here in the future section speaking of pre-tax and deductions I've included this table over here for you to get an idea of how much you paying for all of these contributions from your paycheck every single check and every single month you can also include the year-to DAT contributions you can get this information from your pay stub Kyle had like really wanted to know this information he's like what am I paying for in insurance and it was really interesting when we started writing it down and keeping track of it of how much we've been spending in different types of insurance and retirement and so it just helps you understand exactly where your money is going and if you need to make changes during uh open enrollment or changes to your insurance plan you can see where that money how that money is reflected as you're filling in your budget template you're going to see little summaries start to pop up of how much you're spending in each of those major subcategories including the debt so you're going to see fixed fun fudge and future and then of course your debt payments and a nice little easyto read summary chart right up at the top we've also included a uh note section at the start of the month what do I know in the beginning of this month that may be different maybe it's you know my aunt's birthday maybe I've got like a holiday coming up maybe there's like a 3-day PTO I'm taking anything that might impact the budget that I want to take note of maybe your car insurance premium is due we want to take a note of that at the end of the month we can record any wins any obstacles or challenges or what we want to focus on for the next month this is a breakdown of how to use the simple template and if you're like okay I've got this I've mastered this we can move on to the super template okay so I had started filling this out the super template is different the biggest difference in the super template from the simple template is instead of recording your transactions inside of the actual column here again if you see a formula do not mess with it there's a reason for that that's because the biggest difference is you're going to record all of your transactions using this daily expense tracker chart down at the bottom so you're going to see I've included a lot of different line items here if if you need more cells all you need to do is you can highlight you can actually highlight a bunch of rows here uh so what I did is I highlighted a row by clicking on the number press and hold shift highlight another area of the row to highlight the entire section I'm going to right click or double tap and then I can insert nine more rows above and so now it's added even more and you're going to see maybe the formatting didn't transl but all I can do is click and drag the merge cells and boom now I've got more cells to work with if you need to add more transactions so anytime you have a transaction that you want to record for the super template you're going to use a daily expense tracker you're going to add a description of what you you might see in your credit card statement or bank account statement maybe you went to Chick-fil-A the category would be restaurants so I'm just typing into the cell but you can actually click this arrow and then you can scroll down and look for that particular uh category it's already highlighted restaurant so you're not going to see it in the drop down but maybe it was household and then maybe it was something else so restaurants then you're going to record the amount how much did it actually charge you how much did that show up now you're going to start to see things automatically start to adjust inside of your budget so now we're going to record $17.16 actually spent in the restaurant category and then it's going to show you a difference of what you planned on spending what you actually spent and the difference so let's say our restaurant budget is $350 in the month now you're going to see that adjust and then you're going to see the difference what you have left to spend in the month I think this is like a really really cool feature to show you very quick and simple I can even access this sheet from my phone and I can see I have $332 left to spend on restaurants you're going to still fill out the planned section just like you did with the simple template so we're going to include the rent or the mortgage payment the cell phone the internet you know all of those good things here and then when you actually make those payments when you pull up your credit card or your bank account you're going to write down when that happened so let's say it was on the 15th um let's say if it was the 15th there we go of January then we say electricity again you can click enter for a quick way to highlight this drop- down menu highlight electricity and then let's say it was 135 this month now you can go back up at the top and see it's been recorded as an actual payment and you have a $30 difference here now you're going to see this div uh error formula that's because we still need to include our paychecks so you can include paycheck one two and any side hustle income you can also do like my income significant others income and so then I'm going to say okay I'm bringing in $5,000 they're bringing in $6,000 and then we don't have any extra income and then I'm going to record what we actually brought in and maybe they only brought in $5,000 this time okay and then you're going to see those percentages start formulating here in the right hand column you're also going to see this review this is kind of a more souped up version of that summary table from the simple template so you're going to review the income summary the expense summary you're going to see all the different numbers actually listed in the balance left over okay so we covered the summary of Inc come the fixed fun fudge and future and you're recording all of those expenses inside of your daily expense tracker you're also going to do this for any debt payments that you make so let's say we have a Discover credit card minimum monthly payment is $110 the due date is on the 24th we've got a 24% interest rate with a total debt balance of 3,4 $56 then when we actually go to make the payment for that Discover card we can say discover CC payment if we want to then you're going to see how the drop down menu actually went ahead and automatically updated from debt one to discover CC so you're going to highlight that and let's say we put $200 towards that now you're going to see this summary chart has already Auto updated for you including the expense summary and then you're going to see that actual monthly payment amount recorded here at the top so gray cells do not mess with any cell that has a big old weird formula in it do not mess with if you need to add a six debt here here's how I would do it so what you're going to do is you're going to highlight the row you're going to double tap a right click insert one row above now this should copy over the formula and if it doesn't and it did not all you're going to do is click the row above it to drag and drop down to highlight and create the new formula and because I'm super type A and want all of my lines to be nice and clean I'm just going to drag and drop down to make sure those are nice and clean looks great you'll notice this actually got all wonky so what I like to do is I just highlight the sections of the rows that I want to move up and then I'm going to grab it with the hand I'm going to move it up just like that and this I can click unmerge and then I'm going to highlight the table how I want it to merge merge cells and now I've got this nice pretty pretty little table again boom see it takes a little adjusting if you're adding new cells but I find that this is the best way to still keep the functionality of the of the table without messing up any of the formulas go back and rewatch that section if you want to see how I did that one more time you can do the exact same thing for any of your budgeted items here if you need to add more fun uh lines you just do the exact same thing by highlighting the row adding a new column adding a new row and then copying and pulling down those formulas to make sure that those formulas are also copied over to the new row that you created you're also going to see for the expense tracker I want to I want to pull us over to the expense tracker table this is where we can include anything like Netflix gym membership Disney plus maybe we use the C app you're going to add all of those things here our budgeted amount for each of these things is where you're going to add that in how much is the com app anyways I think it's an annual subscription but you can budget for it every single month so let's say it's $6 when you go to actually you fill this out you're going to see that these subscriptions have actually been updated as a total here so you're only going to see one line item inside of the the fund section for subscriptions but inside of subscription tracker you're going to see every single one listed here when you go to actually make make those payments you'll record it under the subscription tracker so $15 was what you actually paid gy is what you've actually paid for that so on and so forth usually subscriptions are pretty regular unless it's a new year and then they bump up the price you're going to record all of those transactions right there and then it's going to show you how much you actually paid for and subscriptions right inside of your budget okay the way that you use syncing funds inside of the super template is you are going to add your planned syncing fund amount into the planned section when you go to make a transfer you're going to record that as transfer to savings you're going to do shopping cuz that's what the syncing fund is for and you're going to put the $100 and now it's going to show your actual was $100 of what we set aside the sinking funds total you'll have to update manually I like to do the equal sign and then just hit you know $100 or you could hit equals whatever this cell says and then you'll have that sinking fund total listed as a part of your budget you'll want to make sure that you're updating that syncing fund total for every single new month as that syncing fund total rolls over to the next month all right so we just covered syncing funds I want to show you the same thing the simp template provid which are those pre-tax deductions you're going to list that here under this table you also can see the contribution amounts health insurance uh life insurance your retirement uh your Investments you can add in as part of your paycheck so 401K 403b maybe have a flex spending account or a health savings account you can include those balances here month to month to keep track of I've also included quick cheat sheet of instructions of how to use this bad boy but of course come back to this video and rework it every single time and don't mess with the gray boxes up at the top you're going to see this money left over this is going to change as you fill in your budget as you fill in your daily expense tracker your checklist can include the it's works the same way as like the notes feature at the beginning end of the month I need to make sure that I've filled out my budget I've gotten proper estimates for new home repairs that I'm wanting to have worked on for this month at the end of the month you're going to list any wins challenges obstacles or things that you want to work on for the next month you can also label any events if you have a birthday going on Mom's bday um if you have obviously for November Thanksgiving any notes that you want to include like probably increase grocery budget because of Thanksgiving that sort of thing is where you can add that once you've got this filled in you've got everything done at the end of this particular month that's when I would copy over so that you don't have to rework all of this stuff and like retype out discover CC whatever that's when I would duplicate and make this your December monthly budget and be sure to update it up at the top and in the tab okay so that's a look at the super template now let's take a look at some of these debt trackers cuz I think this is really really fun so I've created one for student loans you're going to see this last updated so this is the last time you've gone in and up updated this for yourself so just for your sanity you're like when did I last update it you can just Mark here you know there we go you're also going to list out any of your account names if you have federal student loans you'll most likely see them in groups so group a group AB group BC whatever you can actually list out every single federal student loan that you have so going do student loan AB we can say what the starting balance is the minimum payment is when is the due date what's the interest rate on it and then as I've up updated this here if you scroll down to the bottom each individual student loan has its own table that shows you what the current balance is and again if you see any kind of formula up here in the formula uh section up at the top don't mess with it it's going to automatically update based on what you put in the white area you're also going to see how much you've paid in total it's going to show you your total amount of debt and then any unpaid debt that you still need to take care of so amount paid and the current balance you will see this across the board for every student loan that you enter so we've included a lot because I know people have a lot of little student loans that add up over the course of their time in school so that's student loans credit card debt tracking same kind of situation if you have multiple credit card debts you're going to see them automatically populate here so let's say I have that Discover card I have a Capital One Venture I have Chase Freedom and they all have balances on it so you can go in update your balances and it's always a good idea to say I last updated this on today's date whatever it might be so that you know the next time you come in oh this hasn't been updated in several weeks I need to do that so we're going to do this this minimum payments and now you're going to see these Auto populate down here at the bottom to show you now what's interesting is you can add for every single month that you're making payments on this you can record how much interest has accured and then how much has been paid on that particular card so you could say you know in in November interest ACR was $89 and I actually paid $245 so now you're going to see all of that adjust here so that you get a percentage of how much has been paid this visual is really going to help you stay motivated on your debt payoff plan to show you oh okay I'm getting there I'm making progress I can see that visual Circle just continue to close in on that debt balance so this is a really really cool feature same with your car loan you're going to add it for your car loan I hope you don't have like eight cars we just copied this over you can do this for your car loan and then lastly your savings tracker so the savings tracker Works a little bit differently because we're going to see how much we've saved how much we haven't saved and then any interest earned so I went ahead and included an emergency fund as a savings account I'm working towards the starting balance is is what you have to start with what's your goal amount and then your monthly savings amount so you're going to see all of that updated right here then same as the other charts like if I want to do a vacation fund I have $0 but I want $5,000 in here and I want to put $250 into this goal then you're going to see and this percentage right here is is the interest rate that you're currently earning on that savings account so it may just be a flat 4% now you're going to see auto populate into the second table here and then we're going to record in the month of January how much interest we earned and then how much we saved in that particular month so we could say we did 250 and we earned about $20 and then you're going to see how your savings has increased over time just by using this tracker I think it's a great visual to show you exactly how many savings goals that you might have okay we covered a lot I hope you're still with me in this tutorial it's a lot to digest but it was meant to be a robust system for you to not only track your monthly budget but to track your debt to track your savings goals to track your overall Financial picture and your net worth how much you're spending in the year so that you feel organized in one file you have all of these different sheets to help you on your financial Journey please let me know if there's any questions or concerns that you might have you can drop them as a comment or reach out to me on Instagram at detfree Millennials and send me a DM I hope this tutorial was helpful thank you so so much for downloading and using this template I can't wait to see you just Crush all of your financial goals and build up that finan confidence and I'll see you next time [Music]