I've been busy tweaking the budget.

It's been a few (6) days since I last posted. Thats been a combination of being busy, but mostly it has been a lack of focus. Instead of focusing on this blog, I have been concentrating on redoing my budget spreadsheet for a biweekly schedule instead of a monthly schedule. I ended up going back and transferring all of the 2008 transactions into the new, biweekly form and that entailed lots of fiddly squinting and typing.

It also meant a bit of staring at the old spreadsheet and trying to figure out how I wanted things to work. On the old spreadsheet that I found at FinanceandFat, it had a column for your planned budget, 5 weekly columns for actual expenditures over the month, a total expenditure column and a final column to show the difference between the planned and the actual. It's a very nice monthly budget spreadsheet and I recommend it to those of you using a monthly sheet.

The problem was I just hated the fiddly part weeks. Two weeks a month I was sticking extra days into the week which usually meant going over that weeks budgeted amount for things like food and gas. With a biweekly budget I would be spreading those two extra monthly pay cheques over the whole year effectively. I think that will let me put some of that money biweekly towards operational savings and debt repayment. Instead of two lump payments, I will be having interest work for me more effectively by paying biweekly.

For the biweekly budget, I wasn't really sure how to set it up. I didn't want to just have 26 columns for the 26 pay periods in the year. With a biweekly budget, I would be saving smaller sums to build up to the monthly bills, so I would have to show savings amounts as well as payment out. I didn't want to be moving money in and out of the savings account all the time either. Currently, I'm trying a spreadsheet that has a planned, credit, debit and balance column for each pay period. It means that it's quite wide, but because I can fit three pay periods on the screen at a time, I don't actually have to scroll left and right during a session of date entry.

So I be evaluating my design for the next while and probably tweaking it some more. I'm always interested in better ways of doing things though, so if anyone has a recommendation for handling a biweekly budget, please let me know!

And really, my Christmas excess, soon now!