Free Budget Spreadsheet
A full year of your money in one file: a budget for every month, an overview that tracks itself, your savings and debt goals, and your net worth. No sign-up, nothing sent anywhere.
compound-snowball-budget-spreadsheet.xlsx
16 tabs · formulas built in · works in Excel, Google Sheets, and Numbers
What's inside
The workbook has 16 tabs, in the order you'll actually use them:
- Start Here: a short how-to, a guide to every tab, and a legend showing which cells are yours to edit.
- Financial Overview: a dashboard that pulls straight from your 12 monthly tabs, no copying numbers over by hand. Income, expenses, leftover, and savings rate by month, plus a breakdown of which category takes up the biggest share of your spending across the whole year.
- Goals & Debt Payoff: what you're saving for and what you're paying off, side by side, each with its own running progress percentage.
- Net Worth: what you own minus what you owe, in one number.
- January through December: the same six categories as the online calculator (housing, transportation, food, debt payments, insurance and utilities, everything else), one tab per month, with budgeted vs. actual columns and a formula-driven total, leftover amount, and savings rate.
Every total is a real formula, not a typed-in number, so the sheet recalculates itself the moment you change an input, and the Financial Overview tab fills itself in as you go. Only the yellow cells are meant to be edited; everything else updates on its own.
How to use it
Pull last month's totals from your bank or card app's summary screen rather than guessing, and type them into the yellow cells on that month's tab. The total, leftover amount, and savings rate calculate themselves, and the Financial Overview tab picks up the change automatically the next time you open it. Update Goals & Debt Payoff and Net Worth whenever you like, monthly is usually enough. It takes about the same ten minutes a month described in budgeting basics that actually work.
Spreadsheet or calculator?
Both use the exact same six categories and the same math for a single month, so neither one is more "correct." The online calculator is faster for a quick, single-month check since there's nothing to open or save. This spreadsheet is for the fuller picture: a full year of months in one place, plus goals, debt, and net worth that the calculator doesn't track at all.
Do I need Excel to open this?
No. It's a standard .xlsx file, so it opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, or LibreOffice Calc without any conversion.
Do you see my numbers once I download it?
No. Downloading is a plain file transfer. There's no sign-up, no email collected, and nothing is sent back to this site once the file is on your computer.
Can I add more categories?
Yes. It's a normal spreadsheet, so you can insert rows, rename categories, or extend the formulas to match your own situation on any tab. Just make sure a new row is included in the relevant SUM range.
Do I have to fill in every month?
No. Fill in whichever months you actually have numbers for. The Financial Overview tab's totals and averages only count months you've filled in, so a half-finished year still gives you an honest average rather than one dragged down by empty months.
Comments
Got a question about the spreadsheet, or a tweak you made that worked well? Leave a comment below. I read every one.
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