Monthly budget planner (Printable)
Taking control of your finances may seem like a difficult task. But with the right tools, it becomes much easier. That's why we've designed a monthly budget planner in PDF format for you, which you can print and start using today. In this article, you'll learn how to effectively use our budget planner to help you track your income, expenses and savings.
Click the button below to download your monthly budget template
Why is it worth budgeting?
Monthly budget planning is your ticket to financial stability and achieving your savings goals. By creating a monthly budget, you create a plan for your money, which increases the chances that your money won't go to unnecessary expenses. This way you regain control over your money and know where exactly it goes, which makes it easier to plan and get rid of unnecessary expenses.
Budget planning helps you achieve your financial goals faster and more effectively. Do you want to pay off your debts? Save for holidays or build a financial cushion? You choose your goals and priorities, which you then reflect in your budget.
Of course, just creating a budget won't magically make all your financial problems go away. An equally important element is sticking to the budget and adapting it to changing circumstances. Fortunately, our monthly budget template will allow you to create a plan and track its implementation.
What will you find inside?
Our monthly budget template consists of two parts. The first part contains sections for planning income, expenses and savings, as well as a dedicated place for recording actual expenses at the end of the month.
The next part is designed to track your expenses throughout the month. Here you can categorize and record every expense, allowing you to see exactly where your money is going. And here you have two choices. We have included two templates in the PDF for tracking expenses. The first collective template where you can enter all your expenses and write down the expense category next to it.
The next template allows you to track expenses of a specific category. This may make it easier to later create summaries and analyze the month.
Choose for yourself which method suits you better. You can also use a mix of both methods. It may be a good idea to use a collective template for categories with few expenses (e.g. bills) and for categories in which you have a lot of expenses during the month to use a dedicated template (e.g. food).
How to use a monthly budget planner?
Using our monthly budget planner is simple. At the very top, write down the month the budget applies to. This will make your analysis easier in the future. First, write down your expected income for the month. This could be your salary or earnings from a part-time job. Then plan your expenses and savings. Estimate how much you expect to spend in various categories such as groceries, rent, utilities, entertainment, etc. You can now allocate the rest of the money among your savings goals. Remember to plan an allocation for every penny you plan to receive in a given month.
Now that you have everything planned, you can start tracking your expenses. Record all your transactions in the expense tracking template and constantly add the total amount of money spent / received / saved next to the appropriate category. Thanks to this, you will always be aware of how much money you can spend on a given category.
It may also happen that you exceed the budget of a given category, which will force you to adjust your budget, e.g. by reducing the funds allocated to a less important category. And here we may come across one of the problems of keeping a budget on paper. To make such changes to your budget, I recommend getting an eraser and a pencil. Filling out the household budget in a notebook with a pencil will make it easier to change the data in our notebook.
At the end of the month, it is worth creating a summary to see the final result of our budget. This will allow us to see how much we have managed to implement our plan, and maybe it will lead us to some reflection and conclusions for the future.
Summary
An expense tracking template is a powerful tool that allows you to stay in control of your money. By writing down each expense, you can easily identify your financial habits. Do you tend to overpay when eating out, or are impulse purchases draining your wallet? Recognizing these patterns is the first step to changing them.
Try to write down your expenses every day so that you don't forget about any of them. It is important to record every expense, even the smallest ones.
Categorizing your expenses will help you understand where most of your money goes. This will allow you to make more informed decisions about where you may need to cut back and where you can afford to spend a little more.
I hope you now know how to use our monthly budget planner and decide to try it out. This could be your first step to regaining control of your finances.
Click the button below to download your monthly budget template