Bear Blog Carnival: How I Budget

01 Jan, 2026

Bear Blog Carnival: How I Budget

I want to take some time to talk to you about how I budget. I had this idea while listening to Alive with Steve Burns, specifically the episode Why Money Stresses Us Out with Megan McCoy, I believe. While listening to it, I thought about my own journey with money, and financial literacy, and realized that it all really started because I had a friend sort of give me a push to start getting better with it. So, I thought, why not talk about it here, and maybe it will give a push to other folks! The other thing too, is, talking about money can be sort of stigmatized, so I'm hoping by trying to talk about it more, it makes more people comfortable to talk about it. With that, let's get into it.

Getting Started

I want to start this off with some normal disclaimers - I'm not a money expert, I don't know "the one secret that will make you super wealthy". I'm just going to be talking about how I budget, and what has worked for me, so far.

With that said, the thing I started with is simply keeping track of my spending. I needed to know where my money was going, so that I could then try to adjust my spending so I could have more going into savings (or, at least, stop going so much negative). There are plenty of apps that will do this for you (My wife loves You Need a Budget for example), however I just use a big spreadsheet. Originally in Excel, but now I use LibreOffice for things. In the spreadsheet, I have several columns - Name, Amount, Date, Category, Account, What Was Bought. So, for example:

Once I had that data, I could then make Pivot Tables and graphs to see where exactly my money was going, on either a month to month or yearly basis. This also came in handy one time talking with my parents about finances.

A quick side story

At one point my finances were in a really bad spot. I was already barely getting by, and then I lost my second job due to the business going under. I began looking for another job, however there was going to be a bit where I just simply wasn't going to be able to afford my credit card debt on top of all my normal expenses. So, I reached out to my parents to see if they could possibly help.

Now, from my perspective, my mom and step dad seemed to believe I didn't have enough money for things because I was blowing it on frivolous expenses - spending too much on video games. Because I had the data, I was able to send them the following screenshots:

As you can see, while I did spend some money on video games and hobbies, the majority (62.05%) was spent on Rent, Car, and Food. If I total up my Video Game spending, Hobby Spending, Computer Spending, and Technology Spending, we're at a total of 8.25%. So while, of course, there's the argument of "well any money saved is good when you have no money", I do like being able to enjoy life a little bit. After my parents saw this graph, this was the first time I remember their tone sort of shifting, and them starting to understand "Oh... you just literally don't make enough money".

Now, I got extremely fortunate that they were able to help me. I think it also helped that, when I reached out, I outlined all the ways I was going to try to fix the problem (get a second job again, start studying to get into a better career path, and cut back on eating out significantly were the big points). But, the fact I had this data readily available, made the conversation much easier to have since we had tangible data we could look at and discuss.

Budgeting

The next step from here was actually budgeting. What I mean by this is listing income compared to monthly expenses. This took me a while to achieve, as while I was in college I worked retail, and didn't have a steady income. My hours varied too much. Once I got an "adult" job, with steady hours though, I began budgeting. I got started with a friend sending over the excel sheet he used, however I'll go over the general gist.

Create a spreadsheet, and at the top put your income. I like to look in terms of the monthly amounts, however you can do whatever makes the most sense to you. For me, I list what I make biweekly (that's how often I get my paycheck), and then double that to get the monthly amount. I use the amount I make biweekly after taxes, benefits, and anything else is taken out.

Then, a few lines down, I have "expenses", followed by each month. So, for example:

In the spreadsheet, I'd have all the months listed, but I think you get the point. The amount in each of these cells is the ideal amount to spend, or the amount you budgeted (some things like electricity I budget high as the rate varies). Then, at the bottom of each column, I have it total the monthly spending, and subtract that from my total monthly income. If I see that my spending is over the amount I make monthly, then I need to adjust my budget somewhere. The reason I have it setup monthly like this is in case my income changes or the amount taken out of my paycheck does. So, if I got a second job, lost a second job, health insurance costs went up, etc. I could then just adjust the relevant info from that month forward, rather than it impacting everything.

I personally use multiple bank accounts to keep track of money. So I have one for loan repayments, one for my car, one as a general savings account, etc. So, the next part of my budget, is dividing all of the monthly expenses into whatever account they need to go into. I then total the amount for each account, and use that info to setup my direct deposit. So, for example:

Because I already have the data above about what these amounts should be for each month, I can have it pull that data using the = command in excel (or wherever). So you just type = and then select whatever cell has the data you want, and it should reference that cell for data going forward. Then, at the top of the column (the \$770 in the example above), you can use the command "=Sum(B7:B10)" (without the ""), replacing the letter and numbers for the cells you want to reference. In the example I gave there, it would be summing cells B7 through B10.

Now, a bit I've recently changed. With this second document, where I keep track of budgeting, it also has a sheet for each month, where you can reference the total for each category you want to spend in a month, write down your spending in those sections, and it'll tell you how much of your budget you've spent in that category for the month. I've stopped doing this, because I really wasn't using it. In general, because I'm keeping track of all of my spending anyways, and use separate bank accounts to keep track of money, this extra step felt sort of like overkill. However, my friend who made this originally, he only uses this budgeting document for tracking spending, so it makes more sense for him where he doesn't have the data elsewhere anyways.

If you'd like, you can download my budgeting spreadsheet here if you want to use it as a template for your own budgeting. It may also help you understand more of what I'm describing, and see what commands are used to get the cells to pull data.

Wrap Up

And yeah, that's how I budget! My biggest recommendation for someone who hasn't done anything yet would be to at least start tracking your spending, somehow. To make any change you need to have data, and so if you want to get your finances under control you need to understand where your money is going. Hopefully some of ya'll find this helpful, and feel free to let me know if you have any questions or anything!

About this blog post

This post is for the Bear Blog Carnival. It's a collection of folks making blog posts, largely on https://bearblog.dev/, all around some sort of central theme that changes monthly. If you're interested in participating, follow the link above!

Where to find me:

The best place to find me is on my website. You can see other posts I've made, some tech tutorials, and a bunch of other stuff!

Thanks for reading,
- Moose