
Living simply today means we can be secure and generous in the future! Moving forward, we decided to live every day as if we are taking a step toward our big picture goals. We had let small distractions rob more important needs. We should have had more in our emergency fund. Taking a pay cut and fearing job loss made me realize we were not seeing the big picture, and not planning for our future the way we could have been. Staying home for months on end has taught me that I spend too much money on unnecessary things when I am out and about, browsing! Do you do this too? If we break it down year by year, then we can evaluate what it will take to get there! I’m also sharing the budgeting app that’s helped us stick to our budget and a good ol’ pep talk.
#Dave ramsey budget planner free
That is, the total amount of income must match the total amount of expenses in order for it to work.Today I am offering a free printable to help you see your own family needs over the next five years. (Note that this term also has another meaning, see Wikipedia, but that's not what I'm talking about). This spreadsheet is based around the idea of a Zero-Based Budget In order to use this spreadsheet you'll have to decide what accounts you want to track with it and how you'd like to categorize your spending. transfer: money moving from one account to another.checking account, wallet / envelopes, mortgage, credit card, etc.) account: something that can contain money/debt (e.g.If you feel like helping out please improve it and submit a pull request!)īefore we dive in, I want to define some terms that I'll be using: ( Note: This documentation is incomplete. If you get stuck feel free to post a question in the "Issues" section of the Github repository. Read the instructions in the blue text boxes and try it out. (It does not contain any VBA scripting so might work in other spreadsheet software, but I have not tested this.) How do I use it?ĭownload the financial-plan.xlsx file and open it using Microsoft Excel. I use it and find it helpful so I've shared it with the public for you to do with as you please. They're designed to be hard / impossible to mess up and usually include free technical support.Īlthough I've tried to make this spreadsheet pretty robust (shouldn't be able to get wrong answers without intentionally disabling the worksheet protection feature) and easy to tailor to your needs, I make no guarantees about the accuracy of its calcuations, its reliability, or any other concern. If you're not comfortable working with an Excel spreadsheet and aren't interested in learning that, I recommend using a budgeting app like EveryDollar instead. I think it is a good compromise between a full-blown accounting system (I had been using GnuCash for years)Īnd pencil and paper (if you do this by hand, props to you for your patience and organization!).ĭISCLAIMER: Although it works great for my purposes, I'm an engineer and enjoy numbers, spreadsheets, formulas, source code, etc.

When my wife and I took Dave Ramsey's "Financial Peace University" course in late 2012 we created this spreadsheet to plan and track our spending. Excel-based monthly spending planner Introduction
