Okay, begrudingly or enthusiastically, I am willing to start. Where do I start?
Start simple. Your basic budget must let you add expenses (and income, as negative expense) in about a dozen categories and see the average for each over several months. Everything else is jazz. I keep my budget in an Excel spreadsheet. Excel has served my purposes well since 1997 for this task. My first budget was simple – I had about a dozen columns, one per category, and each row tracked expenses for a particular month. Over time I have added layers of analysis I was fond of to it. Now, my budget automatically calculates my average spending per month in each category and compares the per-month spending to an expected amount. If I exceed my expected amount, the entry turns red. I see red (ha ha, small pun) when there’s red in my budget, so I try to avoid it and/or adjust my spending around it. I also have little bar and pie charts that show pretty much the same information. I track the amount left over at the end of each month and the total of the leftover from several months. You’re
