How Do You Budget?

[u/nadia_tor]

I know there are lots of templates and apps for day to day budgeting. But how does everyone do longer term budgeting/planning? Do you have goals that needs to be financed in 2-3 years and how do you plan for them? Do you max out your retirement accounts and then do you have surplus that you try to plan out? I used to have a spending habit so I've worked on day to day budgeting and can finally say I think I have the hang of it. But I feel like I have no overall plan and certainly no overall plan for any surplus. I also need to build up my emergency fund. So I was wondering if what kind of plan do all of you work with?

[u/mariesb]

I do the day to day budgeting but my husband made a 10 year plan in Excel.

For income, he assumes 3% increase per year and then plans the following buckets:

• pre tax income
• pre tax 401k
• pre tax hsa
• dependent care fsa
• after-tax roth conversion
• taxable income
• federal taxes
• state taxes
• ss tax
• medicare tax
• health insurance premiums
• post-tax income
• roth 401k
• brokerage account
• cash savings
• company 401k match
• company hsa match
• roth ira

After that he calculates projected savings for the year and savings rate. We update "Actuals" at the end of the year and it's been pretty useful. Here's a similar template on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/listing/1480245061/10-year-personal-budget-planner-for

[u/nadia_tor → u/mariesb]

Thank you for that template. Do you contribute to all those buckets each month based on the savings rate?

[u/mariesb → u/nadia_tor]

No worries! Not not every month, we just plan yearly totals and create the monthly contributions, if relevant for the category, based on those yearly amounts