![]() ![]() Whether you’re grocery shopping and cooking at home, or sampling the culinary scene in your geographic locale, it’s crucial to account for food expenses. While food is a survival necessity for humans, it’s also a budget area for the savvy financial planner. Typically, this budget category includes car payments, registration and DMV fees, gas, maintenance, parking, tolls, ridesharing costs, and public transit. Regardless of your location or lifestyle, everyone needs to get from point A to point B. For most budgeters, this category is by far the biggest. This includes everything from rent or mortgage payments to property taxes, HOA dues, and home maintenance costs. The amount you pay to have a roof over your head constitutes a housing cost. They’re usually categorized under housing, transportation, food, utilities, insurance premiums, and other essential costs. Your disposable income is what you have left to spend on your home budget categories. Want more specifics about what goes into these budgeting categories? Let’s dive in! Assembling Your Home Budget Categories The Essential Budget CategoriesĪll monthly budgets start with your disposable income - we can define this as the amount of money you take home from your paycheck after taxes, retirement savings, and other deductions. Recreation & Entertainment (5-10 percent).Saving, Investing, & Debt Payments (10-20 percent).It also offers suggestions for how much of your income you can contribute to each category. This guide reviews a list of budget categories found in a basic household budget. Once you’ve identified your basic budget categories, you can start allocating your spending based on your own individual financial circumstances. The first step involves breaking down your regular expenses into budget categories, in order to get a clearer picture of your spending patterns (including areas where you tend to overspend). A well-thought-out budget can help you take control of your finances and use your money with real purpose, so you have enough to pay your bills, grow your savings, and still enjoy life today. For example, you might want to plan for early retirement, or a hybrid scenario where you keep working part-time or otherwise choose to delay your social security benefits.To put it simply, a budget is really just a plan for your money. These spreadsheets can even help you find the best age to retire. So here are seven of the best free retirement spreadsheet templates. You can build your own retirement planner, but it’s faster and easier to get started with a free template. Get started with an easy retirement template Learn about Tiller’s Foundation Template. And then in your post-retirement years, you can customize your spreadsheet with a budget that helps you optimize spending and protect your nest egg.įollowing a budget can help you save more for retirement and reach your long-term financial goals. You can start using one today to budget, pay down debt, and track your net worth. Spreadsheets are also the one financial planning tool you will never outgrow. ![]() (Of course, the future is uncertain, as are long-term rates of return, inflation, and even lifespan, so no plan is guaranteed – but as they say, failure to plan is planning to fail.) It can also help you see where to make changes today to get where you want to be in the future. This will provide an accurate picture of what your retirement might look like. With a retirement spreadsheet, you can easily input your own numbers and experiment with different savings, investment growth, and withdrawal rate scenarios. A spreadsheet is a perfect tool for the job. Preparing your retirement takes careful planning that begins years in advance. ![]()
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