Making your first budget might seem intimidating. You’re probably thinking, “What kinds of expenses should I even budget for?” To that we’d say, budget for all of the expenses you can anticipate and even the ones you can’t.
If you need a place to start, check out the samples below to help get you going. Feel free to mix, match, and tweak it to work for you! And don’t pay too much attention to the Budgeted Amounts — they’re just placeholders. You can update that with a number that makes sense for you.
Simple Budget Sample
Student Budget Sample
Detailed Budget Sample
Happy budgeting,
The Goodbudget Team
5 thoughts on “3 sample budgets to help you create your own”
I like what you are doing with the boot amp and samples. I am 75 years old and not to sure how to leave comments after each day’s assignment. Is there a way to keep my comments private?
Hi Charlie – Thanks for posting! All comments are public. If you want to take private notes for yourself, that’s definitely encouraged! We’d recommend using pen and paper for private notes/comments or someplace digital, like Google Docs. If you’d like to post a public comment after you finish an assignment, just follow the same procedure you did to post this comment. You can find the Budget Bootcamp assignments here. Hope that helps!
I like the detailed budget best. It will help me keep track of annual subscriptions, mortgage, insurance, vehicle registrations, etc… When those expenses come due I’m always surprised and then we are back in debt.
Couldn’t wait ’til Saturday to start – had to ‘dive in’ now. But I do have a question about creating envelopes and accounts. I like the detailed budget example, but I pay a lot of those envelope items (mthly/qtrly/ann expenses) via credit cards. I have quite a few items auto charged to 2 credit cards to eliminate my needing to remember who gets paid when. These credit cards are paid in full every month and may also be used for ‘regular’ purchases. My question is this – when it comes to creating debt accounts for these credit cards, am I correct in thinking the budgeted value for these accounts should reflect ‘regular’ spending projections as those auto-charged items would have their own envelopes? I know the lessons haven’t touched on actually creating envelopes and accounts yet, but I just want to make sure this will work with how I work. Thanks…
Hi Vanessa — if your credit cards are being paid in full each month, you should put them in your household as Credit Card Accounts and not Debt Accounts. As a separate issue, if you’re creating a Debt Account, you will indeed do as you’re suggesting and set the “budgeted amount” to be the amount you usually pay for (and budget for) each month. Let us know at support@goodbudget.com if you have any further questions about this!