One of the things I really wanted to learn this year was: how to budget. By trying to learn how to budget, I was determined to really take a look at what I am spending my money on & how much I am spending.

Thanks to my day job, I have been lucky enough to sit in on a whole lots of conversations between investors & entrepreneurs, & boy, have I learned so much from just being a fly on the wall. I have also been more open to talking about money & taxes, etc. with my dad & trying to learn things as best I can. Unfortunately for me also, my day job is technically a ‘contract job’ which left me as a self employed gal. Which has really made me start looking into how much I spend, how much I make, etc. because guess who has to file ‘business related taxes’ every few months (aka I have to file my own HST on my own), cue the stress. Thanks to all this, I started reading up on all these finance related topics & decided that I should really (& I mean really) take this whole budgeting thing seriously. I tried last year but I didn’t really know what I was doing & didn’t follow a budget at all, so it kind of defeated the purpose of even keeping track of things.

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
I basically searched on google & found this amazing google doc template that I decided (after playing around with a few) this one would work best for me. Don’t get me wrong it looked so complex & scary at first because there was all these tabs & then spaces to fill stuff out, to be honest I was completely scared & debating what I got myself into. So after spending probably a few hours playing with it (& getting one of my brothers, who is studying finance, to help me), I finally realized that budgeting spreadsheets aren’t that complicated or scary, the really scary part is having to tracking every little detail about your money down…

So I ended up saving one it as a template in my google docs so I can use the same one again next year, & have a saved as version as my working document for 2019. Last month was really eye opening to me with spending, little things I spend money on each month really added up & made me realize just how much of the income I am making is spent each month. I was overly fascinated & shocked. I also decided that at the beginning of each month, I would look at what I have coming up for the month & plan my budget around that, see how it goes. January was a scary month, I had so many things breaking or needing to be replaced that I went over my budget, but that helped me to readjust my spending for this month.

I’m still in the early stages & still learning, but I cannot believe how much my perspective on budgeting & money alone has changed in just over a month! But believe me when I say I am no money expert & I am just trying as I go. I feel like I am one step closer to being an actual ‘adult’ now & it’s scary.

If anyone wants me to share my budget spreadsheet, please let me know. I’d be more than happy to send it your way!

Since i’m still new at this, if you have any tips on budgeting i’d love to hear them!

Do you have a budget? How do you keep track of your budgeting? 

Thanks for reading!
xx cd

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