Budgeting together as a duo should be a priority for couples that want to align their finances with their individual and shared goals and avoid unprecedented financial stresses. Therefore, you cannot overlook the importance of a good budget planner when planning for a future together, in marriage or not. It allows you to write down all your individual and shared incomes, expenses, and contributions towards financial goals such as buying a home or car or college funds.
Couple budgeting also improves communication by opening a window to discuss various sensitive topics, including lifestyle choices, parenting, investment, habits, etc. To assist you with budgeting as a couple, we are offering a spreadsheet template that can simplify documentation and calculations.
How to Use this Spreadsheet Effectively
This detailed template has built-in formulas to help you automatically calculate income, expenses, and savings. Therefore, you need to understand how these components interconnect to use the template effectively.
Here is a discussion of how to budget your spouse’s and your income:
Yearly budget summary
The budget begins with a summary of your yearly finances – income, expenses, and savings. This summary provides a quick visualization of your financial position as a couple before you can delve into the specific incomes, expenses, and savings. To increase visualization, the template has a bar graph that highlights these financial items broken down per month for the entire year.
The bars are color-coded to make it easy to identify trends of each individual financial item on the bar graph. Note that these summaries are automatically generated from the budget components (income, expenses, and savings). You, therefore, do not need to alter the summaries manually.
Income
Income represents the money you and your spouse have earned from various sources, whether it is through wages or investments. This is the money that will be budgeted for and sets the foundation for your financial plans. Each spouse has their income consolidated separately. This template prompts you to fill out monthly earnings from each source.
The yearly total for each income source is then automatically recorded in the last column. Since this is a yearly budget, the template then calculates the total monthly income from all sources and records it in the last row for each spouse. Then, it calculates the total yearly income and records it in the last columns – cell O18 for spouse 1 and cell O28 for spouse 2.
Shared expenses
Expenses are financial outflows. Identify your combined expenses to get a full picture of how much you need for your household and how much each one shares. Common household expenditures include accommodation (rent or mortgage), transportation, childcare/nanny fees, subscriptions, insurance, utilities, taxes, and debt payments. Fill out each type of expense for each month, and the total will be calculated at the bottom row of this section. Also, find the total annual expenses in the last column, cell O39.
Savings
Savings are funds set aside for later use – could be for specific use such as a wedding or vacation at the end of the year or general like a medical emergency. This template guides you to make individual contributions to savings. This is because both of you may have varying saving capabilities, which are often dependent on how much each one of you is earning and the amount of expenses.
Note that all you need to fill in is the monthly savings contribution of each spouse; the monthly totals of both of you are automatically calculated and recorded in the respective boxes.
