Creating a Budget (College Version)

I recently totaled my car, so now comes the daunting task of saving up for a new car. In order to do this, and make sure that I still have enough money to live on, I've been creating a budget for myself. Now, I'm a third year college student who still lives at home, so it's going to be geared towards that, but you can use this template for any stage of your life, just add and remove categories as needed. I know it's not easy to save money, so let's see if we can figure this out.

First of all, you'll need a program like Excell, or a piece of paper, pen, and calculator. (I'll give an example of both).

We're going to start with the paper and pen version first, since this is what I mainly use.

Start with the next upcoming month. I started this in January, so we're going to start with February. I'm not going to use actual figures for this, but I'll put some in to give a better example.

Step 1: Set up your paper.
Now, I'm really OCD, so I have to make sure I have a category for everything I may need in that month. This includes, gas for my car, medical bills, prescriptions, any gifts I may need to buy that month, and an allowance of "blow money" to spend on whatever, as well an an emergency fund. You'll also need categories for income, and what is already in your bank account. So this is a little something of what your paper should look like.

Now comes the task of actually inputting all of the data. This is where the calculator comes in handy. Also, if you're like me and work on an hourly wage, not salary, you may not work the same amount of hours each week, so just make an educated guess of how many hours you'll work to figure out your monthly income. Once you've input the data for income and expenses, it should look something like this. Don't worry about the left over for now, we'll get to that in a minute.

Now we can figure out how much you should have left over at the end of the month. To do this, add up your income and your carry over, and then subtract each expense.

If you're saving up for something, or you just want to make sure you've got some cash put away for any kind of emergency, it's a good idea to take a little bit of money each week and put it into a savings account. Personally, I set up my bank account to automatically transfer $50 each week from my checking account and add it to my savings account, leaving me an extra $200 emergency fund at the end of every month. You never know what you'll need it for and if you don't need to spend any of it, it adds up every month. I have various things I save up throughout the year, so I use what is in my savings account to pay for it. Like in March my sister is turning 18 and wants a tattoo, so everything in my savings is going towards that in March, then I'll start over.

Now that you've got February figured out for your budget, it's time to progress through the year. Don't worry I'll show you step by step how I sort mine out.

For March, set up the categories exactly the same. Since I'm planning on using my savings for tattoos, I make sure that I wait until the very end to deduct that amount of money. So, add and subtract exactly how we did for February. But when I deducted my savings account from what was left over at the end of the month, I then went ahead and deducted how much I wanted to spend on tattoos. In this example, I took out $300, leaving $100 in my savings account for the next month.

This method is a little more time consuming, and a little more frustrating than the computer method. For the next method of creating a monthly expense budget, you'll need Microsoft Excel. This is the easier version, but you may need to tweak some of the categories to better fit your life.

Step one is of course to open up Excel. Go to the File Menu at the top and select New. This will bring up a list of categories. The third category will be Budget. Clicking on this will take you to three new categories. For this example, go to Home budgets. Now you can choose any one you want, but for my personal preference, and this example, we're going to use My College Budget.

Once you've got it up on your screen, it's pretty self explanatory. Just change the information around, so you have the figures fitting what you make and what you need to spend that month.

I generally don't like using the computer version in Excel because the categories are so random sometimes, and it's a pain to tweak them just to fit me. I prefer the paper and pen method, but use whichever you prefer. It's not easy saving money and sticking to a budget, but trust me, if I can do it, so can you. Good luck!