šŸ† Budget Plan - Excel

This is fantastic, thank you! Iā€™ve never had a way to deal with all the nuances of my budget like this. Even the simplest such as getting paid bi-weekly. So this is huge for me. Appreciate the effort you put in here!

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Agreed. It is a pretty awesome tool by @jpfieber.

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@jpfieber Your budget plan seems to be the best one out there. I feel like the features Iā€™m looking for are there, but Iā€™m not finding them.

Is there a way to set up group budgets instead of category budgets? To make this work for me (large annual/semi-annual expenses that need monthly savings), Iā€™ve created four useful budget groups (rather than using the default two: living/discretionary):

  1. Fixed Monthly (e.g., mortgage, internet, phones, savings)
  2. Fixed Yearly (e.g., property taxes, annual insurance)
  3. Flex Monthly (e.g., utilities)
  4. Everything Else (a group that includes shopping, groceries, restaurants, and literally everything else where we make an active choice to spend money).

Iā€™m trying to use groups and categories like categories and subcategories, similar to intuit software. I still want to know how much weā€™ve been spending on restaurants versus groceries, so I still want the categories, but from a budget point of view, I just need to see that weā€™re staying within the guardrails.

The second thing is for those Fixed Yearly Expenses. I need the budget to assume on the first of the month that that money is gone. And then when I spend it at the appointed time, I donā€™t want it to yell at me. My current work-around plan is to make a fake manual bank account, create a transfer transaction for the monthly amount on the first of every month - to make the budget show the funds are spoken for. Then when paying, make a fake transfer back with the category matching so that it comes to $0 on the budget.

Thanks

PS the bi-weekly paycheck handling is really the greatest thing. It is so helpful for those two months a year.

The template wasnā€™t designed with Group budgets in mind. It might be possible to hack it to do what you need, but itā€™s been a long time since I worked with that code, so nothing jumps to my mind. For the fixed yearly expenses issue, I donā€™t have a better solution than what youā€™ve come up with. Thanks for the kind words, sorry I canā€™t assist more.

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This is a great budget plan. Thank you so much for creating it. I was wondering how can I change the background font because when I copied the categories from the categories sheet over to the budget plan sheet, the color is pink, and it wonā€™t allow me to change the background color. Thank you.

Whenever you copy/paste stuff like that, do a copy, then a ā€˜paste specialā€™ and choose ā€˜values onlyā€™ so formulas and formatting are not brought along, only the values you see in the cells. Iā€™m guessing whatever youā€™re seeing is due to ā€˜Conditional Formattingā€™.

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Yes, itā€™s wierd because I did the paste special like you mentioned with values only, so Iā€™ll just have to keep it the way it is. Thank you for your reply.