How to customize LVDletters’ free student budget printable
This post is all about customizing your college budget template.
I’m not going to sugar coat this for you: Managing your finances in college is hard. But having a really good college budget template eliminates the overwhelm of starting a budget from scratch and lets you skip to the part where you can ACTUALLY experience financial freedom.
What do I mean by “financial freedom”?
I’m not one of those people you find online who’s going to tell you that you’ll start living like a millionaire with my simple budgeting tips or something like that. We all know it’s a lot more complicated than that.
But you CAN experience financial freedom in college.
You can experience the freedom of sticking to a budget without being overwhelmed. AND the freedom of knowing that you’re investing in your future in such a way that in just a few short years, you’ll be able to live the lifestyle you want without the burden of debt.
THAT is truly a free feeling.
This post is all about customizing your college budget template.
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll earn a commission if you purchase through my link, at no extra cost to you. Our full disclosure policy is pretty boring, but you can read it here.
COLLEGE BUDGET TEMPLATE TIPS
1. Download our free college budget template!
Here at LVDletters, we’ve put time and effort into making a free college budget template PDF that is perfect for students, and we want to give it to you right now for FREE.
The rest of this post will give you ideas and examples on exactly how to use our student budget template so that you can achieve the maximum level of financial success!
To get started, give us your email address and we’ll send it to you right away!
If you signed up for the template, read this! Sometimes our free products get sent sent to spam or promotional inboxes, so make sure you check all your folders if you don’t see it right away.
2. Create specific financial goals
Our printable budget worksheet for college students provides you with a template to set financial goals. This step is SO important.
Why?
You need to know exactly what you want to achieve financially if you’re going to get there.
Fill in your 3 month, 6 month, 9 month and 12 month financial goals. It’s also a great idea to set more long-term goals; where do you want to be 2, 5, or 10 years from now? (Another great resource for doing this is our free goal setting printable).
Don’t get overwhelmed by this step. Setting financial goals can be something as simple as “I will save $1000 by the end of this year” or “I won’t spend any money on new makeup for 2 months.” Setting simple goals is a great way to get motivated with your finances. You just need to start somewhere!
3. Outline unusual expenses
A super important part of budget planning that most people don’t think about is highlighting upcoming expenses that don’t happen every month.
This might be things like:
- Gifts for loved ones with upcoming birthdays
- A concert or event you’re attending that you’ll need money for
- An upcoming dentist appointment
- An oil change or car repairs that you know you need
By the way…
If you’re using our college budget template, there’s a section at the top of many of the pages where all the months are listed. Highlight or circle whichever month you’re planning your budget for so that you don’t get confused!
4. Write down all your monthly expenses
It’s easiest to start with set expenses that you know will come out of your bank account every month. This includes things like rent, utilities, wifi, phone bill, subscriptions, groceries, and gas money or public transit fare.
If you don’t know where to start for things like groceries, think of how much you usually spend per week. If you spend around $50 per week on groceries, your monthly budget should be $200.
Our college expense budget worksheet already gives you all the main categories, and there’s also a blank template there for you to add your own categories that reflect your budgeting needs. All you need to do is write out your specific expenses and budget limits in the boxes so you can see them all at a glance!
5. Track all your spending
I know this sounds tedious, but it’s one of the most important parts of the budgeting process.
Why?
It teaches you where your money is going.
You might think you know where all your money is going, but you’ll be surprised after you spend a month or two tracking your spending. This is one of my favourite budgeting tips for college students because it gives you a genuine idea of how you’re spending money and where your money is being wasted so that you can correct these mistakes in the future!
Our college budget template has a worksheet for tracking all your spending so that it’s easy for you to see where your money is going. You can total it up at the end of the month to see how much you’ve spent on a particular category.
It’s best to print one tracking sheet per category of your budget, and then if you run out of space, print another page for that category. There’s only one sheet in the printable, but it’s designed so that you can print as many copies as you want of any individual page.
One thing to note:
You DON’T necessarily need to track set expenses like subscriptions, rent, or your cell phone bill if the same amount gets taken out of your account at the same time every month. The reason you don’t need to is because the spending tracker is there to help you hold yourself accountable in not exceeding your budget in categories that are not already set ahead of time.
However, it’s up to you! If you find it easier to just track everything, go ahead and do that.
Got any questions? Leave them below or email me at lauren@lvdletters.com. I’ll really answer!
This post was all about customizing your college budget template.
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