in today's video I want to show you guys on how you can make a simple budget tracker using Google Sheets so that way you can track your upcoming expenses and income which I think is pretty useful as a young adult or just to anyone in general and the one I'll be making is so simple that you can probably just do it yourself in 5 minutes and I'll show you exactly on how to do it so without further Ado let's just jump right in so here I am on a new Google Sheets document and I'm just going to type in 2024 budget tracker right and with this I'm just going to make the title a little bit larger if you go to the very front and you do Windows key and a DOT you can actually type in uh an emoji so I'm just going to put the money sign here just to make it look nice and next I'm going to be typing the month that I'm going to be doing this for which is going to be January you could always duplicate the sheet so if you want to make it for February March April whatever you can always have different sheets here so you can just rename this to just January next up is I'm going to type in the income here and I'm going to type in expenses here right so you obviously you have your paycheck your income and your expenses that you spend on I'm just going to expand this uh you know the column size a little bit and what I can also do as well is just kind of color code them so I like to make them the income to be a little bit more green and the expenses to be red just because it signifies me like hey money's in money's out right um and the following Columns of them I I like to also do a lighter shade of green where I could still kind of read it and a lighter shade of red you want to also make the column over the same color scheme because we're going to start categorizing what kind of expenses we're spending whether it's your wants whether it's your needs whether it's your savings or whatever it is that you're going to be categorizing them which is actually the great thing about this budget tracker once this is done I'm going to go to the right here and I'm going to type in total income and I'm going to type in total expenses here since these are going to be monetary values I'm just going to select the whole column and I'm going to click format as currency same for this one right here right down in the middle and like I said earlier I'm going to start categorizing what kind of expenses I'm spending right so I'm going to insert here a drop down I'm going to categorize it very very generally but you could also become very specific in what you're spending if you're consistent with your spendings so here I'm just going to type in needs for option one wants for option two and savings for option three so it's going to be following following the 503020 rule where you kind of spend 50% on needs 30% on wants and 20% on savings again you could adjust that accordingly but that's just how I'm going to do it so for needs here I'm going to color it red for wants I'm going to color it yellow and for savings I'm just going to color it green just to make it easy to look to read later on right I'm going to hit done here and I could always drag this drop down all the way down here so all my expenses have that categorization I'm also going to go ahead and bolt this and color code this as well just for easy uh to make it easier on the eyes and now we're almost done all I'm going to do is just type in my goals so for example I'm going to type in my needs my wants and my savings goals again you could have as many goals as many categories as you want but these are the ones I'm doing and I'm going to have the actual here so I have the actual needs wants and savings so I have my goals and I have my savings right so now what I can start doing is I can start typing in formulas so for the total income I'm just going to do an equal sign of sum and what are we going to take a sum of sum of column B obviously because those are going to be the income total expenses I'm going to take another sum of column D because those are going to be a sum of my expenses so if I type in $10 here $20 here you can see it starts adding them up and now for your goals here and your actual here you can actually select this column and make a percentage right so let's just say you want to spend uh your income 50% of it on needs 30% of it on wants and you want to save 20% of it so this means that the column after that I want to make this so I have a percentage and I have a monetary value of how much 50% of my income is so I'm to do an equal sign here take my income right here and then multiply it by the 50% and I'm going to do the same thing here I'm going to take this multiply this by this number here and it's going to autofill and it's going to do the same thing where it's going to take H5 which is basically this number and multiply it by i1 which is the savings so if we for example have $1,000 in our income for paycheck it already automatically sorts that 50% of $500 of it is going to be the needs $30 $300 is going to be the wants and and $200 of it is going to be saved that's going to be my goals now we're going to do this backwards but we're going to do it with our expenses this time right so now we're going to do an equal sign over here saying that okay how much did I really spend right so for doing so I'm going to do a sum if sum if means it's going to Sumit if a condition is met right if this field right here is equal to needs then we're going to sum this field of whatever it is that is a need right and I'm going to format this into currency as well you can see how this is currently zero at the moment right but if I start adding needs and I start having like $50 here it's going to start summing it up the $50 but if I don't if it's a want then it's not going to categorize it it's not going to sum it up right it's only going to sum this up if it's a need here on this expense part now I could kind of copy the same formula here and here but this time instead of needs I could change it to wants right and this time here I could change it to savings so now it's going to start summing everything up here according according to its category and now to calculate that percentage as well we can do kind of backwards where we could do equal here and I'm going to take this amount of money that I spent on needs and divide that by my income so then I get a percentage here and I could also do the same thing here where I could do equals to this right divided by income equal to this divided by divided by income perfect so now we have this and now we can see how much of uh money that we're actually spending uh in accordance to our income right so for example if we spend $500 on our needs then we we pretty much hit our goal here we have a goal of 50% and we spent actually 50% on needs um if we for example set a goal of 30% we want to spend $300 on wants and we only spent 20 $20 or 2% that month you can actually kind of visually track here of uh the differences and the different values here that we have you can also do a formula where you could try to subtract this and this so you could have a net of you know net positive net negative of how much you spent but this is just a good way to measure about how much uh of that money are you spending that month so last but not least I'm just going to color code this over here so I'll just make it yellow it's kind of a little bit easier in the eyes just to see what I'm looking at and pretty much we've actually just completed our budget tracker um just some more formatting uh stuff that I can do here is just like merging it together and uh censoring stuff like this so making it look all pretty and here we go we have our simple budget tracker that you could actually track and categorize your expenses and kind of keep in track and keep in mind of where you're actually Landing within your goals also don't forget to format all the different things to currency here and percentages uh accordingly and again you can have as many categories as you want follow the exact same formula that I did but this is just a really basic example that I've done to make it easier on you guys so let's just kind of uh do a mock trial here and see how it works so for example here you got a paycheck and your paycheck is $1,500 and you got another income for example some um you know side hustle right side hustle one you got $250 side hustle 2 you got I don't know four $542 for example so now it tracks your total income of how much you've made that uh that month now we're going to tr track our expenses as well so our expenses for example we're going to talk about uh gas you we need we need gas and we spent $450 on gas uh we ate out today and we ate out good we ate out at a steakhouse and it costed about 180 bucks and that's that's definitely a want and then our mandatory savings let's just add another need for example like uh utility uh for example electricity bill right and our electricity bill to this month was $75 and that was a need so you can tell here that we spent 22 91% on needs or $525 to be exact 7.85% on wants or $180 to be exact and we've saved about 20% of our um money of our income so again with this budget tracker in mind you could actually visual see how much you're spending in different categories and it's pretty simple to make I would say and every young adult who's trying to budget and who's trying to track their income exp and expenses should definitely have this budget tracker in your Google Sheets now I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to hit the like and hit the Subscribe button down below and I'll see you all in the next video