Let me tell you about my budgeting spreadsheet

A Google spreadsheet is much more manageable.

My obsession with budgeting has been fairly well established by this point. But! I’m always making new discoveries, increasing my budgeting accuracy, and trying to find new ways to save.

In an effort to have a much better understanding of how I am spending my Mad Money, a few months ago I reincarnated my budgeting spreadsheet. I’m really keen on having such a minutely detailed record of my spending - firstly, it tickles my lizard brain and secondly, I now have an answer when I ask myself two days before payday: where the hell did all my money go this week?

In fact, keeping such a spreadsheet enables me to tell you that for the period 12-26 November I spent:

• 24.21% of my spending money on food
• 9.51% on coffee
• 10.31% on booze
• 38.50% on clothes (An anomaly. I must have been feeling rich.)
• 1.46% on homeware
• 13.14% on presents or donations.

I made my spreadsheet on Google Docs so that I can make updates on my phone in real time. No collecting receipts! I can make my entry on the spreadsheet between ordering and receiving my morning coffee - so no excuses for not keeping the spreadsheet up to date. (Of course, I’ve been horrible at keeping it over the fortnight before Christmas. But I am back on that bandwagon and feeling smug. Aw yeah.)

Because I am quelle generous, I have made a shared version of my budget spreadsheet that you can download and keep. The cells that are highlighted in yellow are for you to plug in your own information - there’s a space for the date and a space for the amount of money you’ve allowed yourself per fortnight. You are of course welcome to make any changes you like to your version of the spreadsheet - mine has some pretty specific categories and the pay period might not suit you.

Another recent budgeting triumph

I have some regular appointments that were annoyingly skewing my budget and leaving me broke at unfortunate times. So in November I worked out how much I spend every two months on all the appointments, and then how much I would need to put away each fortnight to cover them.

I opened another bank account for the Appointments money - and I set up a function that automatically sweeps any money over $300 straight into my savings account. It’s like magic! Magic savings.

The whole thing has been going swimmingly. Best idea ever.

It seemed like a good idea but didn’t really pan out that way

I had a plan to reward myself for not buying coffee by putting that money into my savings account every day that I bravely and maturely made the decision not to splurge.

However, this never really happened. It was a good idea though - and, at any rate, it would show in a very real and visceral way how much I could be saving if I wasn't frittering my money away on coffee. You should try it and let me know how it goes.

Spend less, save more: eating your income

Lately I've been committed to recording my weekly spend, and one thing has become painfully obvious - I eat or drink most of my money. Between grabbing a coffee and a scone on the way to work, and buying my lunch or dinner, I spend about a third of my mad money on food each pay period.

Food is good and food is important, and it's important to buy food and eat it. At home we put aside a good amount of money each week to buy food for the house and we eat really well - something for which I’m always grateful.

What I'm trying to address here is the additional money I spend on food each week, which is nearly always frittered away on snacks and food that I don’t really need. I want to avoid that feeling three days before pay day when I realise that I have have three dollars of spending money left and nothing really to show for it - not even a super fun night out. And I want to help you avoid it too. We can do it together!

So, while acknowledging that food is my one weakness, here are some suggestions - some of which I follow on a semi-regular basis, and that maybe you could follow more frequently - to stop us eating our money.

Fancy coffee is a treat

While cutting the coffee will not kill debt in itself, making a decision to drink less fancy coffee can make a difference to the amount you can save or repay. It's terrifying to think how much money I must have spent on coffee over the years. As an individual I'm sure that I've effectively propped up the entire Wellington coffee industry*, or at any rate, drunk the equivalent of a house deposit.

These days I try to make sure that I always have the makings of delicious coffee at work. If you're working for a more generous employer than I am, you'll probably already have some kind of coffee banging around the staffroom. But even if you're bringing in your own bag of fresh roasted beans, making coffee - rather than buying it - makes for a substantial saving.

Because being completely puritanical about espresso doesn't work for me, I get a coffee from a cafe once or twice a week. My work-local has a surcharge for takeaway coffee cups which encourages me to remember my Keep Cup, and thus, save the planet as well as 30 cents a pop. The upshot of this is that if I have to go back to the office to get my cup, I will stop - think about the coffee I already have available - and choose not to buy the espresso. At least, that’s the theory.

Better still, I use the infrequency of bought coffees as an excuse to take some time out and have a sit down before work or at lunch time. Not only do I get the caffeine, but also the atmosphere, the comfy seats, the access to glossy magazines, and the people watching. More bang for my buck, and makes it a treat rather than a habit.

Bring the basics

Keep the basics in your bag: fill a water bottle, bring a piece of fruit and a small container filled with nuts or some other kind of sustaining treat. We’re just aiming to make it from lunchtime to when we get home without blowing ten dollars on afternoon tea or buying a drink that we don’t need.

I’ve just started making Bliss Balls which are crazy delicious, but in the past I’ve also made muesli slice or biscuits that I take to work as an afternoon treat. Dried fruit and nuts or bought muesli bars are easier to keep on hand, and something that’s kind of fun if not actively completely macrobiotic is a small container of sprouts - I’m really into sprouting at the moment and sprouts are crunchy and delicious, so, win.

A moment too, to appreciate how annoying it is to buy a bottle of water - creating waste and paying far too much money for something you can get for free? Ugh.

Leftovers and freezer food

Three bean chili, rice and accoutrements

The big daily spend on food is buying lunches during the work week. I love sandwiches, but it can get boring when you’re bringing cheese and bread everyday.** I try and remember to bring a big container of leftovers, and keeping this in mind can dictate what I’ll cook at home - we eat much more bowl food and things that heat up and travel well.

I try to allow for days where there are no leftovers available by making a slow cooker pot of dal or chill beans once every fortnight or so, dividing the food into lunch size portions, and freezing these. In winter, soup is a good option - I used to work with someone who’d make soup with leftover veges (i.e. whatever was left over from last week) and then freeze the soup in resealable bags.

The problem with this plan is that you need to be fairly organised, and if you’re having a super busy weekend it’s just not going to happen. But I find cooking really relaxing, so I’m happy to prep and potter on a lazy Sunday.

These are the slow cooker recipes that I’ve used lately

• Smitten Kitchen: three-bean chili
• Cafe Johnsonia: Slow Cooker Red Lentil Dal

These Budget Bytes home-made frozen burritos and quesadillas also make good, simple lunches to keep in the freezer.

Dinner out is a social exercise

In another attempt to control my spending, I’m trying to make any dinners and lunches in cafes and restaurants social exercises. I get to enjoy both delicious food and delicious company!

Once again, the plan is to move away from considering expensive pre-prepared food a necessity and towards thinking about eating-out as an event on which it’s worthwhile to spend my money. That is, I want the experience to be one I savour and that is memorable. Not too much to ask?

Spending less on food is an ongoing project for me - do you have any suggestions to help?
Also, here is a 2010 post about the same thing: Money and the fine art of Not Frittering It Away on Food.

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*Only a tiny bit of hyperbole. Really.
**This is a lie. Cheese and bread are two of my main food groups, and I can happily eat variations on them every day. For the purposes of this blog post, however, let’s pretend that it can get boring.
***I really love doing this.

Spend less, save more: you still need to buy stuff

The previous post in this more-than-infrequent series covered working out how much you spend each pay period and what you were spending it on, and making a spending plan. In this post I’ll look at how to stay within your allocated week's spend, some things I found helpful in breaking the impulse buying habit, and ways to better plan your spending.

Buying stuff is fun to do

It can be hard to stick to your budget, especially if you’re used to the thrill of the impulse buy. The plan is to ultimately get the same thrill from saving or paying back debt. Or failing that, that you get a kind of puritanical thrill from your self-control. (YOU HAVE SO MUCH SELF CONTROL, look at you, walking around wielding it like a sword of light.)

The best way to slow or stop over spending if you’re an impulse buyer is to stop putting yourself in situations where you’ll spend. Tell yourself: you have no reason to be in a place where the main purpose is to buy things if you have no money with which to buy anything. For the time being, act as though you can’t be trusted in these temples to consumerism and just avoid the hell out of them. If you have someone who enables overspending (*cough* Mum, Lizzie) avoid going into shops with those people especially.  

This precept goes for op-shopping too. Whatever you’re going to buy may be cheap, but you still if you are spending outside of your budget, you can't afford it.

If, like me, you spend far too much time on the internet, you'll see many pretty shiny things in the world. It is natural to want such things. Instead of actively buying them, why not play a slightly masochistic game of ‘online window shopping’, by filling your basket and then shutting down the browser altogether. This will demonstrate your immense self control and give you the thrill of budget control. Try laughing defiantly while you do this ("ha HA!”).

Perhaps you like looking at nice pottery, or furniture, or beautiful vintage fashions? Can I recommend museums and art galleries as an alternative to shopping? Looking at collections of vintage clothes and crockery in museums and galleries gives me much the same feeling as looking in a shop full of nice second-hand clothes and furniture, but completely removes the risk that I might buy anything - provided I avoid the gift shop.

To the left is a particularly fabulous basket chair I saw at the V&A when I was in London last year. It’s beautiful and amaze and a museum piece. No budgets were harmed in the viewing of this covetable item.

Write it down and walk away

For better or for worse, you’ll never be able to avoid buying things entirely. A few years after my initial decision to buy less stuff I had to deal with the hard reality of this - things wear out, things break, and some of these things are expensive to replace - I’m looking at you, shoes.

The plan is to work out what is a necessity and what is a nice to have - I have a list on Evernote that I update on a regular basis along with the estimated costs of what I 'need' and what I 'want'. Things often appear on my 'need' list and then waft over to 'want' during the course of a week or month. ‘Needs' are bought first, ‘wants' often never - because wanting things can be so fleeting.

I found the best way to break my impulse buying habit was, if I saw something covetable, to write it down and walk away for an hour or so. If it was still vitally important that I buy those shoes, or that bag, or whatever, then I came back. I often find that after the initial flush of discovery has died away, the item in question isn't worth the walk back to the shop.

Op shopping is a different matter. Of course, walking away is always an option - leaving the ownership of a particularly delicious item of tat up to chance. But truth be told, I find that if I'm walking around a shop and holding an item in my hand for any length of time, I suddenly decide that my desire for aforementioned item was nought but a whimsy, and back on the shelf it goes.

Buy once, buy well

If you’re going to the trouble of making mature, responsible spending decisions, you might as well buy something that’s of good quality. Stop buying things because they’re the closest approximation of what you really want, and take the time to research, price compare and weigh-up quality.

The platonic ideal is to buy only top quality goods, with the assumption that they'll last forever. Like me, this might not be an ideal that you can afford most of the time. That’s totally fine. But decide in advance (your need/want list will help) what features you want the item to have, and if you can’t find something that fits the most basic of those requirements, don’t be afraid to go without.

Can I also say that saving up for something and then buying it outright is kind of an amazing feeling. Recently, Shannon and I saved up and bought ourselves a brand-new bed and futon mattress. We knew how much we needed to save for the bed on top of what we are already saving for houses and we saved it! It felt as though it took an age - but lying on that bed is like lying on a beautiful firm cloud of smugness and financial responsibility. TRY IT.

You could also consider whether the thing you want is something you could easily pick up second hand. For example, about five years ago I decided I needed black Doc Marten boots, found a pair on Trade Me for I think $50 max, and they have lasted me forever. They saw me around England, Berlin and Paris and I have never regretted buying them.

Share tips with me on my favourite subject! I have a million more - you can try also reading some posts from 2010 where I talk about wallet feng shui and clawing my way back on to the wagon.

In my next post: food is delicious, I am spending all my money on food. Help.

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Brief life update

Have I already mentioned that I’ve been feeling quite fragile lately? Because, guys, honestly I have. I am working on it though. It’s tiring.

I also want to take a moment to briefly discuss two recent baking disasters.

The first featured an apricot cake that I attempted to take as a dessert to a friends’ house - the oven switched itself off (as it’s wont to do during periods of extreme haste) and so I was already running late/in a panic. When I tested the cake with my trusty skewer it defo seemed cooked. However, apparently not, which I discovered to my utter chagrin at the moment of truth (i.e. when I attempted to cut a piece and the centre oozed. Cake centres should not ooze). 

The second baking disaster involved a carrot cake I made on Saturday as a late birthday cake for Shannon, and again, I tested the cake with a skewer and everything seemed hunky dory. This time I had iced the cake and we’d sat down with a cup of tea before the oozy centre of the cake was revealed. I wanted to (╯'□')╯︵ ┻━┻

Today I successfully made some muffins tho, so maybe I am winning now. LOOKING GOOD.

REPOST: Spend less, save more: making a spending plan

This post was originally published in June 2013, the first in an intended series about money and spending. I still have those posts in draft, and I fully intend to publish them. Thus, this repost serves as a refresher.

Back in 2010, I started paying back my debt with a vengeance and it became a pretty substantial blog project for me. I wrote up a bunch of interviews with people who I thought dealt with money well (Nat, Lizzie, Lake) and a series of posts about how I was dealing creatively with not spending so much. I think 'money' is probably one of the most used tags on this blog.

While I'm not blogging about it as much, spending less money and being out of debt/saving myself some dollars is still very much part of what I do on a day to day basis (witness: savings tower). I am nauseatingly proud of this and should not be engaged in conversation on this topic. Just ask anyone.

Having refined my savingsy/frugally ways over the years, and boring the pants off of everyone I know, I thought it was timely to revisit some of the most helpful things I've found to do to spend less and save more. I hope that someone else finds this useful - I know that in the beginning stages, reading blog posts about people in the same situation as myself was incredibly helpful and kept me on the straight and narrow.

I'd initially planned this as a single blog post, but realised that I had so much that I'd learnt and wanted to share into the ether that it made more sense to make it a series.

Thus, the first logical step:

Get your foundations sorted: work out a budget.

The concept of budgeting has such a stink of deprivation around it that most people are disinclined to look into their budget until they're absolutely at the end of their financial tether. I know I was.

Because I'm now saving, rather than paying off debt, it's something I rather enjoy these days (how horribly smug of me). I like to think about it as my spending plan, rather than my budget.

The questions you're trying to answer with your budget are: Where is my money going? How much do I owe? How much do I want to save?

1. Where is it going?

It's super hard to work out a budget without knowing how you're spending your money already.

There are a couple of ways that you can collect data about what you're spending your money on. The most straightforward way is to collect receipts and enter your daily spend into a notebook or spreadsheet, categorising each transaction as you go. Alternatively, you can use some kind of software or app that will pull information from your bank account and put it into categories based on your definitions (you can use something like Kiwibank's Heaps or, if you have access to it, Mint). I've used both the receipt and electronic methods - and sometimes a combination of the two.

Even once your budget is sorted it's good to keep an eye on your spending, as it helps to see how you're tracking against your budget and if you need to work more on the plan that you've nominated. It's not always easy to keep up, but it is worthwhile.

At this point, you can also rationalise your spending. Work out what outgoings are fixed: bills, rent, food, transport costs. I don't do this now, but I used to include my ration for coffee in my weekly fixed costs (they now sit under 'fun'). It's up to you whether you want to do this, but be aware that it will affect any capacity for saving or paying back debt and sometimes considerably. For example, I drink soy flatwhites which cost $4.50 each a day. If I budget for my daily coffee, then I am budgeting for $31.50 each week or $63 a fortnight. Or $126 a month. (Eep). I'd rather spend that on my trip to Europe, thanks awfully!

2. How much do I owe?

Since you're looking carefully at your bank account and spending, you should also work out how much you owe - add together ALL your debts, even the little amounts.

Calculating your debt seems crazy scary, but finding out the worst is better than being hazy on your debts. I've found the reality is rarely a friendly number, but it's a matter of 'better the devil you know' when it comes to debt.

When I first worked out how much I owed, it was truly the first step in having a sense of ownership of my finances. It was also a rather large number.

3. How much do you want to save/at what rate do you want to pay off your debts?

You can work out the rest of your budget - what you'll save, how you'll pay off your debt, and what you can spend for fun - from this point.

I've been trying to save or pay back my debt at around $400-500 pw, so I'll nominate that amount to go into my savings and look at whatever is left over for fun money. If I didn't have an aim in mind, I don't think I would be saving at such a steep rate.

I believe you should be paying off your debt before you begin to save, as saving money at the same time as paying off debt is self-defeating. Interest rates on credit cards and overdrafts are really high and unless your savings are in something like a term deposit, the interest you're earning on your savings won't make up for the interest you're paying on your debts. I know that there are arguments to the contrary, but I'm yet to see a convincing one!

Lately I've been keeping aside around $200 for fun money - 'fun' includes things like haircuts, coffees, social evenings, clothing and knitting/sewing stuff. I also try to make it cover medical expenses, although it's nice to know the savings are there to cover in a pinch. If I know I have a big expense coming up, I'll adjust my other expenditure accordingly. For example, I'm planning to get my haircut this week and pick up a pair of boots from the repairer - so eating lunch and dinner out is off the agenda.

I know from past experience that I can have a totally acceptable social life on around $100 a week - and I'm planning to scale back to something closer to this for the next few weeks of saving before my trip. It's nice to know what my absolute minimum limit for fun spending is (while having a not-hermit existence), and that I can scale back to this at any time.

I was reading the comments on a Stuff article about budgeting a few weeks ago, and the general tenor seemed to be: "that advice is all very well, but not buying coffee doesn't save me much money or fix my immediate debt problem". The point is, you can't fix your debt immediately, it must be done incrementally. And the true cost of debt is time.

Finally, it's important to remember that budgets aren't static! Some weeks are simply more expensive than others, while others allow for more money to be put aside (I saved heaps when I was glangey). Be honest about what you're spending and re-examine your budget on a regular basis. It's basically a hobby of mine.

I will never get bored with talking about money, and how to save it. Do you have anything super helpful about budgets that I haven't covered here?

Next time: Cheers for all that. So, how the hell do I stick to this budget?

Spend less, save more: making a spending plan.

Back in 2010, I started paying back my debt with a vengeance and it became a pretty substantial blog project for me. I wrote up a bunch of interviews with people who I thought dealt with money well (Nat, Lizzie, Lake) and a series of posts about how I was dealing creatively with not spending so much. I think 'money' is probably one of the most used tags on this blog.

While I'm not blogging about it as much, spending less money and being out of debt/saving myself some dollars is still very much part of what I do on a day to day basis (witness: savings tower). I am nauseatingly proud of this and should not be engaged in conversation on this topic. Just ask anyone.

Having refined my savingsy/frugally ways over the years, and boring the pants off of everyone I know, I thought it was timely to revisit some of the most helpful things I've found to do to spend less and save more. I hope that someone else finds this useful - I know that in the beginning stages, reading blog posts about people in the same situation as myself was incredibly helpful and kept me on the straight and narrow.

I'd initially planned this as a single blog post, but realised that I had so much that I'd learnt and wanted to share into the ether that it made more sense to make it a series.

Thus, the first logical step:

Get your foundations sorted: work out a budget.

The concept of budgeting has such a stink of deprivation around it that most people are disinclined to look into their budget until they're absolutely at the end of their financial tether. I know I was.

Because I'm now saving, rather than paying off debt, it's something I rather enjoy these days (how horribly smug of me). I like to think about it as my spending plan, rather than my budget.

The questions you're trying to answer with your budget are: Where is my money going? How much do I owe? How much do I want to save?

1. Where is it going?

It's super hard to work out a budget without knowing how you're spending your money already.

There are a couple of ways that you can collect data about what you're spending your money on. The most straightforward way is to collect receipts and enter your daily spend into a notebook or spreadsheet, categorising each transaction as you go. Alternatively, you can use some kind of software or app that will pull information from your bank account and put it into categories based on your definitions (you can use something like Kiwibank's Heaps or, if you have access to it, Mint). I've used both the receipt and electronic methods - and sometimes a combination of the two.

Even once your budget is sorted it's good to keep an eye on your spending, as it helps to see how you're tracking against your budget and if you need to work more on the plan that you've nominated. It's not always easy to keep up, but it is worthwhile.

At this point, you can also rationalise your spending. Work out what outgoings are fixed: bills, rent, food, transport costs. I don't do this now, but I used to include my ration for coffee in my weekly fixed costs (they now sit under 'fun'). It's up to you whether you want to do this, but be aware that it will affect any capacity for saving or paying back debt and sometimes considerably. For example, I drink soy flatwhites which cost $4.50 each a day. If I budget for my daily coffee, then I am budgeting for $31.50 each week or $63 a fortnight. Or $126 a month. (Eep). I'd rather spend that on my trip to Europe, thanks awfully!

2. How much do I owe?

Since you're looking carefully at your bank account and spending, you should also work out how much you owe - add together ALL your debts, even the little amounts.

Calculating your debt seems crazy scary, but finding out the worst is better than being hazy on your debts. I've found the reality is rarely a friendly number, but it's a matter of 'better the devil you know' when it comes to debt.

When I first worked out how much I owed, it was truly the first step in having a sense of ownership of my finances. It was also a rather large number.

3. How much do you want to save/at what rate do you want to pay off your debts?

You can work out the rest of your budget - what you'll save, how you'll pay off your debt, and what you can spend for fun - from this point.

I've been trying to save or pay back my debt at around $400-500 pw, so I'll nominate that amount to go into my savings and look at whatever is left over for fun money. If I didn't have an aim in mind, I don't think I would be saving at such a steep rate.

I believe you should be paying off your debt before you begin to save, as saving money at the same time as paying off debt is self-defeating. Interest rates on credit cards and overdrafts are really high and unless your savings are in something like a term deposit, the interest you're earning on your savings won't make up for the interest you're paying on your debts. I know that there are arguments to the contrary, but I'm yet to see a convincing one!

Lately I've been keeping aside around $200 for fun money - 'fun' includes things like haircuts, coffees, social evenings, clothing and knitting/sewing stuff. I also try to make it cover medical expenses, although it's nice to know the savings are there to cover in a pinch. If I know I have a big expense coming up, I'll adjust my other expenditure accordingly. For example, I'm planning to get my haircut this week and pick up a pair of boots from the repairer - so eating lunch and dinner out is off the agenda.

I know from past experience that I can have a totally acceptable social life on around $100 a week - and I'm planning to scale back to something closer to this for the next few weeks of saving before my trip. It's nice to know what my absolute minimum limit for fun spending is (while having a not-hermit existence), and that I can scale back to this at any time.

I was reading the comments on a Stuff article about budgeting a few weeks ago, and the general tenor seemed to be: "that advice is all very well, but not buying coffee doesn't save me much money or fix my immediate debt problem". The point is, you can't fix your debt immediately, it must be done incrementally. And the true cost of debt is time.

Finally, it's important to remember that budgets aren't static! Some weeks are simply more expensive than others, while others allow for more money to be put aside (I saved heaps when I was glangey). Be honest about what you're spending and re-examine your budget on a regular basis. It's basically a hobby of mine.

I will never get bored with talking about money, and how to save it. Do you have anything super helpful about budgets that I haven't covered here?

Next time: Cheers for all that. So, how the hell do I stick to this budget?