The Budget You'll Keep

A first budget for a household on regular pay, and a year of planner pages that match how often you are paid.

If you have never kept a budget, or you have started one and stopped, this book starts from nothing. It explains what a budget is, what you need, and how to make one in a single evening with three months of bank statements and five highlighters. Then it shows you how to keep it for a year in about forty minutes a month.

It is built around the reasons budgets usually get dropped: costs that seem to "come out of nowhere", numbers that were guesses, tracking every purchase, one bad week, and pay that does not line up with the months.

How it works

• The setup evening (about two hours), in five steps. Find your real take-home pay and which paydays are extra. Highlight three months of statements in five colours to see where the money actually went. List every cost that does not come every month (the car, birthdays, December, back to school) and work out what to put aside for them. Build a one-page plan that balances, with one weekly number to live on. Then decide which pay covers which bill, and set your money to move by itself on payday.
• Keeping it. A ten-minute weekly check, ten minutes each payday, a twenty-minute month-end review with one change, and what to do when something goes wrong: fix it, do not start again.
• Two households, worked through with every number shown. Dani in Ohio, paid every two weeks, with two credit cards. Priya and Tom in Leeds, one paid monthly and one every four weeks, with a child and a mortgage. You see their pay stub and payslip, a full month's bank statement highlighted line by line, their lists, their plans, a month that did not fit, a washing machine that broke, and a debt payoff month by month. The sums were all checked by a script.

What is inside the book (51 pages)

• Start here: what a budget is, who the book is for, what you will have after one evening
• Why budgets get dropped, and what this book does about each reason
• Step 1: take-home pay, US pay stubs and UK payslips, two incomes, and the extra paydays of weekly, every-two-weeks and four-weekly pay
• Step 2: getting statements, how to highlight, statement shorthand decoded, and twelve awkward lines (Venmo, cash, refunds, buy now pay later, card payments)
• Step 3: the not-every-month list, a prompt list of 59 costs people forget, and a year map of when they land
• Step 4: the plan, the weekly number, five ways to make a plan fit, and the rules of thumb you will hear (50/30/20 and others) used as checks
• Step 5: which payday covers which bill, and setting up accounts and automatic transfers
• Keeping it: the weekly check, extra pay, the month-end review, the first three months as a draft, budgeting as a couple, emergency savings, and paying off debt
• Free, confidential debt help in the US and the UK, with names and numbers
• Every planner page shown filled in, with notes on what goes where
• A US and UK money word translator

The planner (41 pages)

Set-up pages (your pay with a payday calendar, three months in five colours, the not-every-month list, the year map, the bill calendar, the plan), an extra pay plan, twelve months of two pages each (a month plan and five weekly checks with a month-end review), a not-every-month pot ledger, a debt list and a page for each debt, a savings goal, a spending diary and a year review. It is undated, so you can start in any month.

It comes in three versions with the same pages, differing only in the month plan: Paid Monthly (also for pay every four weeks), Paid Every Two Weeks (also for twice a month), and Paid Weekly. Print the one that matches you.

What you download

• The Budget You'll Keep (51 pages, PDF, US Letter, full colour, with bookmarks)
• Three planners (41 pages each, PDF, US Letter): Paid Monthly, Paid Every Two Weeks, Paid Weekly
• A ZIP with all three planners in A4

Good to know

• The planners are for printing, or for writing on in a note-taking app that lets you write on PDFs. They are not fillable forms and do not add anything up.
• Black and white printing works: the colours are light tints and every section is also labelled in words.
• Examples use dollars and pounds; the planner pages have no currency symbols.
• This book is about planning everyday household money. It does not cover investing, and it is general information, not advice for your situation. If you cannot pay the minimums on your debts, it tells you where to get free help.
• If what you are paid changes a lot from month to month (freelance or commission work), this method is not the right fit.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book is shipped.