How to Start Budgeting & Saving Money With a Calendar

Jordan Budgets
by Jordan Budgets

Do you want to learn how to start budgeting and saving money? I am always asked how and where to start when setting up a budget. Everyone’s budget is personal, including ours, so the needs change for every family. But I’ll show you how to start a budget as a great starting point.


You may wonder what you need to buy to start a budget and the answer is nothing. You can always buy a cash budgeting template, but you don’t need one if you follow my steps.


Budgeting with a calendar

1. Gather free items

Find a free calendar. Look up free calendar PDFs online. Print out a few blank months. Grab a calculator (or one on your phone), an assortment of highlighters, or different colored pens or just write in black and use highlighters! You’ll need to do some color coding.


You’ll need to be able to pull up the past month’s bills and expenses and insert the date they were paid on a previous month’s blank calendar. I have been using cash budgeting as a way to put money into sinking funds. My actual purchases like eating out have come off of a credit card and main account.

How to start budgeting

2. Pull your previous month’s expenses

I pull them from my main banking account and a credit card. We are going to go back into the last 30 days and fill this calendar out with every expense we had over the last month. You need to know exactly what you’re spending your money on in order to create an accurate cash budget.


For example, you may think you need $600 a month for your grocery budget when in reality you need $800 a month to spend on groceries. That’s what’s happened to me the last couple of months because I stopped tracking my spending. But I want to get back to tracking my spending. 

Creating spending categories

3. Create your spending categories

If you don’t take the step and go over the past month’s expenses and bills, you won’t even know what categories you need to focus on. I remember when I was not tracking I didn’t realize how much I was spending on certain categories, like school supplies and clothing. 

Using a calendar to budget

4. Insert your numbers onto the calendar

Start with writing in your income. You can choose to write them in green if you want. A word about doing this on paper versus online: I have found that this process works best if you do it with actual paper and pen rather than just online.


I will spend hours creating and formatting a document and then it gets lost on my computer. It’s just not how I work. So I added in all of my payments and they look pretty much on par with other monthly payments.


Keep in mind I’m not writing about my business expenses here, but those expenses do have to come out of my income. 


5. Color coding

A specific color means a specific category. Green means income, gray means bills, yellow is for groceries, blue is for fast food, and purple is for “other spending.” I also have a category for “need” which is orange.


Put the color code on top of the calendar sheet so you can keep them straight. You can break these categories down how you’d like, you don’t need to match mine. You can break it down even further, so instead of “other,” you might break it out into vacations, Amazon shopping, etc.


6. Tracking in hindsight and in real-time

I try to pay all my bills at the very start of the month so I don’t worry about things throughout the month.


At the end of this, you total your bills up. I can see that we hit $200 for groceries just in the first week of last month and I didn’t realize this until I tracked it. But I was also surprised at some of the weeks when I didn’t spend much at all on groceries.


So you are now tracking in hindsight, but you will track in real-time on the current month’s calendar sheet. I also just round up to the nearest dollar when putting down my expenses.

How to start budgeting and saving money

7. Total your categories

Let me use my categories as an example. I spent $2,029 on bills, $785 on groceries, $548 on other things, $60 for fast food, and $613 for our needs (doctor visits), plus business expenses which are not on this calendar.


My income definitely covered all my bills and expenses last month. Sometimes, we feel like we’re overspending, and once we track things, we can see that we are not overspending, or, where we are overspending and where we need to cut costs.


For example, I keep saying I have to reduce my grocery budget but now that I’m tracking it, it’s fine! I can see I don’t need to trim it. I notice if I lower my grocery budget, we’ll only end up eating out more, so my fast food category expenses will become larger and I don’t want to do that, either.


How to start budgeting and saving money

This is the first step in how to start budgeting. It may take an hour or two to start, but all you need to do is print out a few pages of monthly calendars, track your spending, and you can see where your money actually goes.


Does this help you begin to start a budget plan? Let me know in the comments if this was helpful.  

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