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Setting up your own personal finance worksheet is easy, and you can take advantage of your computer to make one. For example, if you have a copy of Microsoft Money (latest version is 2007, but older versions work), you can open the program and follow your nose to the Budgeting Wizard. You'll be asked to set up both income and expenditure categories, so make sure you have pay stubs, monthly bills, and any other expenditures you need to track.

Microsoft Money does the rest. By means of its check register and credit card expenditure tracker, for instance, as you enter a payment of a monthly bill, the amount is tracked against your budgeted amount. Each month, or at any interval you wish, you can see how your budget is tracking both overall or for individual amounts. Money also allows you to download credit card expenditures and track individual charges against your budget.

Not into MS Money? If you have MS Excel installed on your computer, there is a free personal budget template that you can download from Microsoft's web site. The template is available at http://office.microsoft.com/en -us/templates/TC062062791033.a spx

You'll get a completely programmed spreadsheet with a monthly (in columns) and some common expenditure categories (in rows). The formulas that do the adding and subtracting are already programmed into the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet is downloaded as a template. A technical note: If you get a message saying something about Active-X not being available, ignore the message and scroll down the error page and find the "Download Now" button.

Microsoft's free budget spreadsheet is attractively formatted, has pre-entered budget Income and Expense categories, which you can add to or alter as needed, and, as I stated above, the formulas for the math are already entered.

The spreadsheet template has an additional benefit, too. If you're not familiar with spreadsheets, the free spreadsheet is a great opportunity for some self-teaching. Be careful not to type in the grayed and bold letter totals columns, or else you'll overwrite the formulas. If you make this error, you can recover, though. Just click (select) the cell where you accidentally overwrote the formula, find the "AutoSum" icon on the tool bar (it's a Greek Sigma - looks almost like a capital "e"), click on it and press enter.

Good luck with your budgeting. Anyone needing technical assistance is welcome to contact me through Helium's "contact this writer" links on this article or on my About Me page. I'll be glad to help!

Learn more about this author, Jerry Curtis.
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