Family Budget Planner for Excel (2024)

Our Family Budget Planner Template is a great spreadsheet for creating a yearly budget plan for your family. Budget Planning is essential for every family, who is serious about its financial future, and has certain economic goals, such as saving, buying a car, purchasing a house, putting children through college and other important financial objectives. For that reason, we believe that this budget template is a must-have tool in any family's financial toolbox.

Unlike other personal budget templates on our website, this budget planner was designed to reflect simple day-to-day requirements of a family and to help you track your budget monthly, quarterly and annually.

If you think this family budget planner is not quite right for you, I recommend to take a look at my Personal Budget Planner, Household Monthly Budget and Personal Monthly Budget planning templates, which can help you track your budget monthly, quarterly and annually, and find categories more suitable for you and your family.

Disclaimer - The spreadsheet and information on this page is intended for educational an illustrative purposes only. Use information at your own risk. It is strongly advised to consult the qualified professionals regarding financial decisions.

How to use a Family Budget Planner

Family Budget Planner: it is a simple template that helps to track your budget monthly, quarterly and yearly.

The family budget spreadsheet contains 3 main parts:

Budget Planner - Income

Income part which is comprised of the fields for projected income and for the actual income. This is usually is the first step in budgeting, since this helps to allocate amounts for the monthly spending and savings.

TIP: Always plan to spend less to gain more, in other words, to save more.

Budget Planner - Spending

Monthly spending: I have divided an entire year into four quarters, in order to avoid possible confusion when you plan your budget. This makes things easier when entering the amounts that do not have monthly frequency, such as some subscriptions or utility bills you may receive quarterly or annual tax returns or simply any irregular payments.

Budget Planner - Results

Spending total and the results part: this is where you can see the estimated and actual spending for each category, including any differences and results for each quarter of the entire year. All amounts in this part of the spreadsheets are cumulative and will be updated every time you update your budget. This means that you will not have to wait for an entire year to get your budget results. In fact, obtaining information this way will help to achieve certain budget or/and saving goals.

Savings Goal is one of the latest additions to this template and our response to requests submitted by many users of our family budget planner. Savings' goal helps to set specific short or long term savings goals for various purposes, track your objectives as you create your monthly budget and display all accumulated information in simple to read graphs. You can also enter any savings you have made prior to the time you began using the budget. Quarterly figures are automatically entered for you. They are copied from the Savings & Investment category of every quarter.

Budget Planner - Savings Goal

Creating a budget enables you to answer two important questions: Do I spend more than I earn? and What can I afford to spend? It can also help you identify the items and categories where you may be overspending, but, most important, this budget template can help you make future financial decisions and concentrate on savings.

Creating a Family Budget

There are two key questions that can only be answered by creating a budget.

1. Do you spend more than you earn?

Consistently spending more than you earn will lead to debt. Creating a budget will help to identify categories where you overspend.

2. What can you afford to spend?

Most of the free budget tools online are concentrating on the monthly spend, which is not exactly the right thing to do, because some of the spending may not occur monthly or even yearly, therefore this particular template is specifically concentrated on tracking your budget monthly, quarterly and annually in order to achieve greater accuracy and it gives you a holistic perspective. An accurately prepared budget can enable you to spot the categories where you may save or spend.