Finances are a major topic for couples, whether fiancés, newlyweds, or longtime married couples. This is because couples’ financial goals have to align to make sure other aspects of the relationship like payment of utilities, rent, mortgage, insurance, investment, and debt repayment are settled on time. This is where a couples’ budget comes in. It helps you and your partner create a solid plan on how you will spend your combined income.
With a plan in hand, you can identify your spending and saving habits and identify areas to improve or alter to make sure you have enough to cover your immediate, short-term, and long-term monetary needs. This prevents money wastage and improves allocation based on your shared priorities.
Since budgeting is a regular and not a one-off exercise, it takes a lot of work and time-consuming to create a couples’ budget every financial period, for instance monthly. Therefore, having a template like the one we are offering is a game changer. It offers a pre-made layout that you can follow to create a joint budget with your partner at a moment’s notice.
How to Use this Spreadsheet Effectively
This template has a simple layout that makes sure your budget covers all the basics of budgeting, income, expenses, and savings. Each element incorporated in this spreadsheet is valuable to your efforts to manage your finances.
Here is a breakdown of these components:
Budget overview
Preliminary details like the month, year, previous savings, current income, expenses, and savings help provide a quick overview of your finances during this budgeting period. The figures are automatically adjusted as you fill out the budget.
Income
Your first step is to identify your sources of income as this forms the foundation of your budget. Each partner should list their income sources separately. Examples of typical income forms include wages, salary, rental income, bonuses, tax credits, dividends, etc. With this spreadsheet, all these incomes are automatically calculated and recorded in the ‘Net Income’ entry boxes for each individual spouse.
Savings contribution
As a couple, you need to set your financial goals and record them in your budget. Whether they are short-term or long-term. This way you are able to intentionally set money aside for these goals in your budget. For instance, under this section, you have financial goals like an emergency fund, investments, repayments, home repairs, etc. However, this list is not exclusive you can add other unique and individualized goals. All the savings allocations are automatically summed and recorded in Cell I11.
Individual and shared expenses
Expenses form the next core element of your budget. As a couple, you will have separate and shared expenses, for example, everyone’s gas expenses can be separate while car payments are shared. This division framework will depend on how you agree with your partner. Some couples assign household expenses, for instance, one covers utilities and the other pays for groceries. As a result, individual expenses need to be recorded under Spouse 1 or Spouse 2 sections.
On the other hand, shared expenses such as mortgage/rent should first be recorded under the ‘Shared Expenses’ section. However, since these expenses have to be accounted for under the individual expenses of each spouse, this spreadsheet automatically divides the total shared expenses (Total in Cell I22), where 60% is covered by Spouse 1 and 40% by Spouse 2 and the figures are added as the Shared expenses items under for each spouse.
Note that you can divide the shared expenses as you prefer, whether 50/50, 70/30, or any other. After everyone’s contribution to the shared expenses is determined, It is added to their individual expenses, and the totals are automatically calculated and recorded under ‘Total’ placeholders – Cell C22 and Cell F22 respectively.
Division of expenses
Under this section, all the expenses in the budget are aggregated and the sum is recorded under Cell C28. This gives a clear picture of how much you and your spouse are spending during the reporting period. This information helps contextualize and compare spending habits for both spouses.
Budget summary
The budget summary indicates how much both of you earned and intend to spend for the specific reporting period. Under this section, you will find the total income for both spouses and total shared expenses from above. These figures are used to automatically calculate your disposable income – the amount of money available after all financial obligations have been fulfilled.
Visual representations (pie charts)
Lastly, this spreadsheet has a visual representation of your budget meant to quickly get a preview of your financial health as a couple without necessarily looking at the specific figures. This is because there needs to be a balance between income and expenses for your financial habits to be sustainable. This spreadsheet offers two pie charts, one for you and the other for your space. The pie charts are automatically adjusted as you fill in the different sections of the budget.
A Quick Word
You can access this spreadsheet in Excel (XLSX) and Google Sheets file formats. These formats make sure that you can leverage the spreadsheet capabilities and formulas. You can also leverage the unique features of Google Sheets, such as the ‘Share’ option, to make sure you and your partner can access the joint couples’ budget from anywhere and view real-time updates. Remember to start your budgeting process by setting financial goals, whether is to pay off debts or buy your first home together.
