Weekly, Simple Budgeting Tool

By: Michael Foster, CFA, CFP®

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Full disclosure, I stole this budgeting idea from Ben. He and Alexa did it first. He then explained it to me, and now my wife and I do the same thing.

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Just because he thought of it doesn’t mean I can’t blog about it though, right? Please forgive my early 2010s Lord of The Rings meme. It’s all I could think about writing the prior sentence out.  Besides, I didn’t invent estate planning, global diversification, or asset location, and I’ve blogged about those. 

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Both Ben and I track a budget, and we try to get our clients to do so to varying degrees. Certain people like the ritual of entering expenses into a well-built spreadsheet with categories, giving nice charts, and providing the data needed to see changes through time. Other people just want to know that the amount they’re saving and spending is going to help them hit their goals and is within their means. There is no one right answer for everyone.

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Regardless of how in-depth you like to go, we’ve found that a very simple tracking of weekly variable expenses in a note (or shared note with your spouse) can be a worthwhile addition to your budgeting process. The goal is to make the data entry as easy as possible. Spreadsheets or regular meetings are great, but not exactly user-friendly while running errands, ordering coffee, or doing things on the fly. 

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Basically, my wife and I built a budget based off of monthly income. From here, we backed out things like taxes, regular savings (retirement, home projects, emergency fund, etc.), and fixed expenses (mortgage, car payment, insurance, etc.). We try to automate these items as well as we can through automatic bill pay and movement between different accounts on a regular schedule. 

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With savings and fixed costs backed out, we are left with a monthly amount for discretionary or variable expenses. We multiply this number by 12 to get annual discretionary spend and divide that by 52 to get the weekly total we can reasonably spend within that budget. From here, we have a shared note in the Apple Notes app that we update with those weekly variable expenses, each time totaling up the weekly sum to see where we are in relation to our number. It literally takes 5-10 seconds to enter in the moment and gives both of us a real-time look into our weekly spend. It took a while to build this habit up, and we’re not always perfect at it, but we do our best. At the end of the week, either create a new week at the top of the note or simply delete the prior week. 

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The only other thing I’d add is a weekly tracking system for larger discretionary purchases to allow for some flexibility. For instance, if buying an expensive gift for a relative or making a large Costco run, enter it over multiple weeks. Instead of hamstringing our discretionary budget for one week, we spread the larger expense out over a max of 4 weeks. Anything that we can’t spread over 4 weeks comfortably, we save up for and pay one-time separately from the weekly variable budget. For example, I might enter “Wedding Gift $200 total, $50 for this week (1 of 4)” on the shared note. When copying or deleting the note for next week, I simply leave that line and make it “week (2 of 4)” and so on until it rolls off.

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There’s no one right answer to what works best for budgeting. Having some easy way to track expenses on a regular schedule may be a benefit to add to your overall budgeting process.