Budget

Creating a budget is simple if you use the method previously discussed. You can collate the information from your monthly analysis to discover an average spend for each of the topics that you have found.

You could create a formula adding all the months petrol costs, for example, and then divide it by how many months you evaluated which will give you the average spend on petrol per month. Do this for all of the topics and then if you want to reduce your spending you can then work out which ones are realistic to cut down (for me Petrol costs are travelling to uni and work and so there isn't much room for reduction, however food and drink could be reduced).

These can be targets that are reduced by 10% or so and then reduced further if needed as you don't want to squeeze too much too soon.

Then you can create a column next to the other one probably best to start in D, in line with the relevant row input the formula =B7*0.9

In this example it would reduce the average petrol cost by 10% and so this would be how much you could spend per month which if done across all of the topics then you would be reducing all costs by 10%, so instead of spending £380 per month it would be £352. Some might be able to make quite a bit of saving and so be much better off per month. This is a good example of poor money management because they have spend more on average per month than they make, which would mean they are either in debt or losing savings.