Budget Evaluation Checklist (6 Easy Steps)

In this article, we will look at budget evaluation and how you can regain control of your finances. This article also explores budget evaluation to help you create your budget in a way that helps you meet your financial goals.

Budget Evaluation Checklist

Here is a budget evaluation checklist to help you evaluate your budget:

How To Assess Your Budget?

To assess your budget, you compare what you spent against what you planned to spend. At the close of each month, you should review your budget and utilise the information to create your budget for the following month. At least once per year, you should evaluate your current budget and financial objectives. It takes a few steps to assess your budget, but it’s a low-effort procedure that doesn’t take as long as creating your initial budget.

Comparison of Actual vs. Planned Expenditures

Following the creation of a monthly budget, you should log your expenditure in a budget spreadsheet or an application like You Need a Budget on a regular basis. 1 Assess if you overspent, underspent, or remained on budget for the month with your budget and cost tracking in front of you.

If your expenses surpassed your budget, you might be able to cut back on any spending areas that were usually higher than you had planned. Alternatively, if you spent less than you had budgeted, you may be able to raise your expenditures for the next month in any areas where you spent less than you had expected.

You’re on the right course if you spent what you expected to spend, but based on the financial situation for the following month, your budget may need to be adjusted.

Assessment of New Income And Expenses

Because a budget reflects your monthly spending plan, it’s critical to ask yourself at the close of the month what your income and costs will be for the next month. These might be the same as last month’s or drastically different.

A lifestyle change might result in an increase or decrease in income or spending, which should be reflected in the next month’s budget. A loss of employment, for example, might result in a decrease in income. 

Food, utilities, and personal care goods, to mention a few, may all see an increase in expenditures if you’re getting married or starting a family.

Reviewing Financial Goals

Your financial objectives may change from month to month, in addition to changes in income and spending. If you just paid off debt, for instance, you may have a lot of additional money in your budget to allocate to other areas. It’s critical to incorporate your goals into your budget in order to attain them.

Modifying Budget Based on Needs

• Adjust your budget to reflect the new income, spending, and financial objectives you’ve established for the coming month. 

• This might be as easy as reducing wasteful expenditures and shifting funds from one area to another. However, if any of these financial factors have changed dramatically, you may need to re-allocate funds to each expenditure area.

• You can make changes to one, only some, or all of your spending categories. For example, if you are debt-free and have hundreds of dollars more each month, you may allocate all of that money to a few specific spending areas or divide it evenly across all areas.

Identify And Fill Any Loopholes in Your Budget

• The process of assessing your budget may discover hidden flaws in your expenditure, known as budget leaks or loopholes, in addition to changing your budget to suit your financial situation. You’ll need to put extra expenditure limitations in place to fix them.

• For instance, you could perhaps discover that you used your credit card too often or plunged into your savings account, in which case you should shift to a cash-only spending plan, start leaving your credit card at home (and even freeze it in a chunk of ice), or put your savings in a certificate of deposit (CD) to make accessing the money extra hard.

• Setting these self-imposed spending restrictions will help you stay on track all across the month. 

• Similarly, if allocating money for multiple spending categories has proven difficult, try moving to an envelope approach, in which cash is divided into individual envelopes for distinct spending categories.

Monthly And Annual Budget Review

• At the end of the month, review your revised budget to ensure that the modifications are effective. 

• It won’t take much time to complete this monthly financial check-up on a regular basis, and it will help you improve your budget over time.

• Allocating time once a year to review your annual budget, which is a plan for how you will spend your money over the following year based on your yearly income and spending, can also be useful. 

• A yearly budget, unlike a monthly budget, covers non-recurring items (such as auto insurance and healthcare bills) and exposes larger spending habits.

• This form of budget enables you to track where your money goes over time, which can help you prioritise your expenditures in order to meet your long-term financial objectives.

Put Your Budget On Paper

• There are a plethora of options for budgeting, whether you’d like to use an excel spreadsheet, write it down on paper, or utilise a budgeting pdf template. 

• You have alternatives, from the budgeting applications available today to all of the fantastic tools available online. 

• What matters is that you maintain track of your spending by making a detailed budget plan that you can return to.

Hold Yourself Accountable

• The final and most crucial task is to hold yourself accountable. Even if you accomplish steps one to seven, you won’t be likely to maintain your budget if you don’t hold yourself accountable.

• Creating a budget is excellent, but you’ll lose track of your final objective if you don’t remind yourself why you’ve been budgeting in the very first place. 

• Your ultimate objective might be to save for a house, pay off debt, or just take another step toward financial independence. You earned it, whatsoever your “why” is. You put forth a lot of effort to earn this money.

• Maintain accountability by checking in with your budget on a frequent basis. Develop a habit to examine the budget you created in step 2 at least once a month. 

• Do it on a weekly basis if you’re down for it. This is where you’ll see your short-term expenditures mount up, enabling you to keep track of before it is too late at the end of the month.

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at budget evaluation and how you can regain control of your finances. This article also explored budget evaluation to help you create your budget in a way that helps you meet your financial goals.

Frequently Asked Questions: Budget Evaluation Checklist

References

Budget Preparation Checklist

How to Evaluate Your Budget