Total Expenses

To start lets just total your annual projected expenses. Every monthly expense gets multiplied by 12 or the number of months left in the year you’re budgeting for. Yearly expenses obviously only added once. Twice yearly = x2 Weekly = x52 so on and so forth. Add these all together to get the total expected expenses for everything you’re responsible to pay for.

This is where I like a spreadsheet because I’ll break down the information in different columns to include name of expense, due date, minimum amount, frequency, annual total and then an extra column you’ll leave blank for now.

Total Income

Next you’ll do basically the same thing for your income. Salary or consistent wages are simple enough to calculate. Though you should mind any unpaid leave you’re aware of. For example if you know you’ll be gone 2 weeks to visit family for Christmas and you won’t be paid, subtract those two weeks from your total multiplied.

Trickier is commision, tips and side hustles. Since I have no surefire way of telling you exactly what you can count on you’ll have to figure your average in these categories. Safer to play it on the conservative side. For example, if you think you average $500 a week in tips during busy season you might only use $450 per week during said season. Get that total and then scale back to figure $300 per week(or whatever your numbers may be) during the slow weeks/months. Add the two totals together for expected yearly income. Do this for each of your income streams.

Comparison is the thief of joy

The lowest part of this whole process is likely at hand. Do you have enough income to cover all the things you’re spending money (or credit) on? I know we didn’t. It was a huge eye opener for me. No wonder we were carrying debt and always stressed about money. It’s alright if you’re there too. You can get it sorted with some determination and sense.

If you do have enough income to cover expenses… congratulations! The next steps will ensure you know how much needs to be put where and how often. So you can watch your vacation fund grow in anticipation of a well earned respite to come.

Either way, please keep all your information as it is for now. You’ll want to keep it as it is because this is an accurate representation of what your actual budget looks like and/or how far off you may be from the budget you really need.

Let’s finish this already!