Our Budget Planner and Setup

Want a peek into our budget planner and how we keep our bills organized?

Well get ready because that’s what today’s post is all about.

Recently I’ve been sharing a closer look into our actual finances with some budget check-ins. I think taking a peek into how other families are managing their money is super helpful. Especially those months where unexpected expenses come up – like needing brakes or medicine for your dog. I started getting a lot of questions on how our money looks – not the actual flow, although I did share how we setup our bank accounts awhile back. But what I do each week to make sure bills are paid, budgets are updated and everything is tracked.

I put together a quick video of what my weekly budget check-in looks like, which is also our money date. In this video I show off how we update our budget each week, track our spending on our online check register (thank you Google Drive) and make sure our bills are getting paid.

Each week I spend about 5-10 minutes just going over our family’s finances. I like to have J around so we can talk about any big bills, trips or expenses that are coming up; however, if he’s not around I still do our weekly check-in (just by myself). It helps a lot to have our time planned out, we do 3 months at a time so I know of any trips, birthdays, or events that we might need a little extra money for. That way when I’m taking a look at our budget for next week, next month, or whenever then I can plan accordingly.

I put together a simple budget planner with a printed budget template, a bill tracker and other notes to make sure we keep our finances in order.

You can watch the video online or down below to see exactly what I do each week:

Here’s the gist of my routine:

I log onto our Google Sheets page that we use as a check register and then log into our online banking. From there I reconcile our bank statement with our register. This takes about 2 minutes since I do it on a weekly basis there isn’t a lot of activity.

Next I open up our budget spreadsheet (I’m working on a new one that will combine your check register with your budget on one screen – I’ll keep you updated!). I also pull out my envelopes for tracking while on the go – make sure I didn’t miss any spending that I need to account for and check the receipts for right amounts. I add in any spending from our online banking, cash, credit cards, etc. to our budget. This takes about 5 minutes if we had a lot of activity, if not then it takes a lot less.

I also compare what bills have posted with our bill tracker to make sure we’re on pace to get everything paid.

I then spend less than a minute seeing where were at for the month – are we over, under, how much money do we have left in groceries, eating out, etc.

Finally I spend about 2 minutes comparing our calendar to our budget – should we be saving some of our eating out money for an upcoming trip, do I need to plan on buying snacks for a road trip, or what does our meal plan need to look like to keep us in our budget.

You can learn more about how we use Google as our check register in this post.

I love using a clamp binder instead of a typical three-ring binder. It takes up less space and I can easily store it in a filing cabinet. Mine is super old, but you can find a similar one on Amazon for less than $4.00. I also use dividers so it makes organization a lot easier, but you could always use post-it notes to separate your different sections. I have a section for: monthly bill tracker, debt payoff, account tracker, paid in full (all of our paid off letters and trackers go here), and goals.