The five sections your budget needs

With examples from our own family budget

Photo by NORTHFOLK on Unsplash

I’ve been working recently to beautify, streamline, and update the budget spreadsheet I have been using for our family. The work has made me think about the conscious choices I made when structuring our budget.

I try to be intentional about how we create our budget, which includes putting careful thought into how we organize the various parts of our budget. Today I’d like to share part of that organizational process. In particular, I’d like to share why I have found it helpful to divide our budget up into five sections.

If you are new to budgeting, check out this article on creating your first household budget.

Section 1: Income

The first section of our budget is perhaps the most obvious. A budget, by definition, is a reconciliation of money in and money out. And so naturally we need a place in the budget to capture the money coming in.

In the section of my budget spreadsheet, we track both our expected income and our actual income. We separate it out by the salary I pay myself (through implementing the Profit First system in my business), the salary my husband receives, the interest we earn through the various high-yield savings accounts we have, and any miscellaneous income…