Stay at Home Mom - Family Budgeting

It was requested on my YouTube channel 'Being Mommy with Style' to tackle the subject of family budgeting when you are a stay at home mom.

This is such a complex topic, I'm planning on it being a multi-part series and I would love an answer any questions you have about budgeting or how to get started. We've had a family budget since my husband and I were newly married, without children, and both working. Our budget has evolved over the years as our needs changed, we were able to gather more data to figure out what we spent on average in certain categories, and we learned what categories were "trouble" categories for us.

We keep all of our data in an Excel spreadsheet, and while it has a number of formulas linking pages together and the like, the idea is quite simple. Track where we are spending money, make sure we are using it to the most of our advantage, and stay within budget.

I've offered to share a "blank" template of our budget with my YouTube viewers, and I will do so in this post.

I have had people ask me to share our specific budgeting numbers, and my take on this is: budgets are an individual thing. You really have to work within your own parameters, your location, your situation,  and honestly not worry about comparing your budget numbers to other people that may be in different financial situations. Some people will need to alocate money towards commutes (tolls, higher amounts of fuel, more vehicle expenses), other people may have short commutes, but have a job that requires going out to lunch more often. If you have two incomes, you may need to account for different things such as daycare and additional doctor visits.

So I have opted to not share specific numbers and instead share a framework. I'm hoping that will be helpful to those that had questions and please let me know any additional questions you have about budgeting, getting started with a family budget, or saving. I would be happy to help give opinions from our perspective since we have budgeted for a number of years. (Keeping in mind I'm not a financial planner, ha!)

Here is the template of the budget that can be used in Excel:

 FAMILY BUDGETING TEMPLATE

Please do not distribute or use for any commercial means. Thank you!

Check out the video on this subject here: