Monthly Personal Finance Tips
Now I'm going to show how to carry this budget over for the next month. You see this is January, 2008. And we want to start February's budget so what we do is highlight all of the columns A through L and we want to copy and paste that. And we highlight column M. And this brings over the budget identically as it was for January. So we need to change the date to February. We need to change the status to wait in the same color code that we're decided on. We need to zero out the amount paid. And we'll copy and paste that, all the way down. And we want to continue on, on the total other expenses. And down here we're going to change this because it may not be the same so we'll key zero in there. And if John's pay changes we'll key in the new amount. If Mary's still getting overtime we'll key in a different amount that we expect for her on that, too. And we're going to clear the date paid. And so now we're all set up for February. And once we start getting bills in we'll change the status from wait to received and from received to paid. Update our color code. Key in the amount paid. We can also key the amount that we expect to pay when it's a repeating bill. Like the education loan. And some of the other repeating bills. Like on the car payments and the house payment. When it's time to move to a new year? We'll assume like we've completed December 2008. We'll go to a different tab for 2009. And remember we've got twelve months on 2008. All we do is just the same thing that we did for February 2008. And that's highlight the columns and go to the new tab and highlight column A and paste it in and then just change this to January 2009. And that's all there is to updating your budget.