How to Compare Income & Expenses

How to Compare Income & Expenses
Now I'm going to talk about on other expenses, how we get the budget amount and the budget minus paid difference. So in this example I've got $1,200 budgeted for food/household expenses. And $500 for clothing. And $400 for entertainment. Over here on the budget minus paid I've got differences calculated the same way, the difference is when you subtract the amount paid from the budget is the amount that you have left that you can spend against. So in my example you can see that there's $374 left for the month on food/household expenses. We're a little bit over budget on clothing, $48.52 in the hole. And $65 left to spend on entertainment. Now down here on vacation and savings, since these are fixed amounts and they already know what we're going to do each month with that, there's no variance between the columns. Over here I've added a column just to show how much we've saved for vacation. So we've got $600 saved on vacation. Savings account is $2,500 and I've got that totaled up at 3,100. That just gives them an idea of how much further they have to go before they achieve their goals. The next section we totaled up the total other expenses in the total monthly bills and we have our total dollars out. Then down here on the money coming in, the monthly paid for John and Mary. You can see that we've got $3,600 coming in and that's what we expected to come in. But Mary's pay, we expected 3,000 to come in but she's actually entitled to overtime and so she got $200 worth of overtime that we didn't expect. So that gave us a little difference in our favor of $200. So when we add that up we have $200 that we didn't expect, we're still $460 ahead of our budget at this point during the month. So this shows us all together that we're $660 ahead of where we thought we would be but we still have you know some expenses to come in probably in favor of food/household and maybe entertainment. So, considering that we're about three quarters of the way through the month, this gives us an idea of how much money we're allowed to spend if we want to stay on a budget.