Good question. While sites like Mint.com are a godsend for those who have online banking, it leaves the rest without such privileges out in the cold. Don’t worry MS Excel has your back.
MS Excel has budget templates that allow you to manually enter in your income and expenses. The best part is that these templates do all of the math for you.
Go to http://office.microsoft.com, select “Templates” and search for “budget”. There are different types of budget templates you can choose from. Just pick the one that fits your needs best and download it.
If you have MS Excel 2007 just click on the Office button, select “New”, and select budget from the templates section. These templates are the same Excel templates found online, this is just an easy way to access them. Choose the one that fits you best and download it.
A good template for teens to use is the Bi-Weekly Budget template especially if your after school and summer jobs pay every other week. For teens who just entered into college the College Budget template may work best for you as it includes tuition, rent, lab fees and other college expenses you will need to keep track of.
These templates give you a better feel of how to create a budget manually – that is if you really want to – and your account details are not shared with a third party.
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