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The first time I tried to create a (simple) budget, I failed. I forgot so many costs because I had no Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet to guide me. Here’s how I’d go about planning my budget successfully today.
The reason you might fail at budgeting (as happened to me in the beginning) could be that you don’t know all of your exact expenses, or you forget some of them. Then, it is impossible to budget successfully. Because budgeting is the process of creating a plan for how you spend your money (since you already know where and how you spend it) to ensure your money serves your goals. All you need is your income and a list of your exact expenses.
In this post I provide a FREE Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet that includes pre-defined categories for your fixed and variable expenses. I bet by the end of this post, budget planning will be so easy for you that you will successfully create your first simple budget and stick to it. And by the way, a simple budget is a basic plan that shows how much you earn, spend, and (not) save each month. It makes it easier to reach your financial goals.
What Are Fixed And Variable Costs?
Fixed expenses are bills you have to pay at a regular interval. Most are fixed monthly expenses. The amount usually stays the same, at least for the moment, until it rises (e.g. due to inflation as it did over the last few years). These predictable payments are easy to plan for and form the foundation of a simple budget. I talk later about why you should start with those when creating a simple budget.
Variable expenses change from month to month and fluctuate. They depend on your consumption and how much you spend, which is up to you. As variable expenses can go up and down, they are harder to predict.
What Are Examples Of Fixed And Variable Expenses?
Examples of fixed expenses you may have every month include rent, debt payments (such as mortgage, student loans, car payments), daycare and school, subscriptions and memberships, utilities, or a phone and internet bill.
Examples of variable expenses include groceries, gas, clothing, hairdresser, or entertainment (such as going out or eating out). Others can be savings (for short-term or mid-term goals), investing, gifts, or donations for charitable purposes. Although these are not bills or fixed costs in the true sense of the word, they do occur. Our free worksheet includes a variable expenses list with the most common examples.
Periodic Fixed Expenses: Why Tracking Matters For Budget Success
Periodic fixed expenses don’t happen every month, but still come regularly, like quarterly or once a year. So, the timing is less frequent than with fixed monthly expenses. Examples of periodic fixed expenses include insurance payments, some utilities, property taxes, special medical consultations or treatments, and any yearly subscription fee. The amount is predictable, but it requires more careful planning and budgeting to take care of those.
Tracking periodic fixed expenses matters for budget success. If you don’t, you may forget to plan for them. So, what happens when the expense comes up? Because it will. You either have to use up your savings, or your bank account goes into the red, which leads to debt.
Wouldn’t it be liberating and reassuring to always have the money available to cover all fixed costs when they arise? But, how do you account for your (periodic) fixed expenses in a monthly budget? You need to automate fixed costs where possible. More on that in the paragraph “Start With Fixed Expenses”.
How Do You Find Fixed And Variable Costs?
- Look through our free worksheet below and read about the 110+ personal budget categories.
- Find the exact payment you have to make towards each (periodic) fixed expense. How?
- Go through your bank account and search for the name or company you expect to have to pay. Or look through your contracts behind your (periodic) fixed expenses. Or both.
- Write down the amount of your (periodic) fixed expense by using tracking tools (see below).
- Write down the due date in your tracking tool of choice (see below).
- Plan how to cover that expense in the future (see below).
- To figure out how much you spend on variable expenses, you need to track and review what you spend regularly. I’ll explain exactly how this works in the next paragraph.
How Variable Expenses Affect Your Budget: What To Do About It
Unfortunately, we don’t treat variable expenses like fixed expenses, where we only have a certain amount of money available. And when that money is used up, there’s simply no more money to spend. With variable expenses, we just spend. Often more than planned on things like food, shopping or travel without realizing it. This can quickly blow your budget and lead to the same result as the regular fixed costs we talked about earlier.
What can you do about it? Track your expenses and revisit your spending. Ideally, weekly or several times a week. I emphasized that topic in my previous blog posts because: Nothing is more important than tracking your expenses. Only if you are aware that you don’t keep spending under control (or as desired), you can prevent this from happening. Awareness is the first step in the budgeting process. So, let’s talk about how to track variable costs.
Tracking tools like YNAB allow you to track your variable costs (or any other expenses) as well as plan your (periodic) fixed expenses (more below). It costs a little money, but for us, it is absolutely worth the cost. We use YNAB for more than 10 years now and couldn’t be happier. If you want to, you can use our referral link and show some support if you enjoy what we do. Signing up with our link and applying for an annual subscription after your trial period leads to both of us getting 1 month of YNAB for free on top.
But you can also find (free) tracking tools online like The Best Budget Apps for 2025. Whatever tool you choose (paper, an Excel spreadsheet, or an online tool) just make sure you track your expenses. I recommend The Budget Mom if you want to dig deeper. She explains the exact process, from collecting your bills to organizing them and writing down your expenses on paper or online.
Start With Fixed Expenses When Creating A Simple Budget
When you create your first simple budget, you need to ensure your (periodic) fixed expenses are taken care of first, as they make up the majority of your budget. Plan how to cover that expense in the future. Let’s look at an example for the periodic expense utility bill. Ask yourself:
- How often do I need to pay my utility bills throughout the year?
- How much money do I need to save each month to be able to fully pay those when they’re due?
- Write down the amount of your fixed expense and the due date in your tracking tool of choice.
- Set up an automatic savings plan from your regular bank account to your savings account.
- If you have no separate savings account, open up one. It takes minutes.
- Regularly check if you’re on track with saving for your fixed expenses.
- Repeat that process for ALL of your fixed expenses.
The Importance Of Building Sinking Funds For A Simple Budget
What is a sinking fund? A sinking fund means you put aside a fixed amount of money for a specific amount of time each month during the year. You do this until you’ve saved up all of the money you need to fund your goal and access the money. Common examples include a Christmas fund or a family vacation fund. Sinking funds help us to be financially prepared for certain expenses that come up every year.
I want to give you a personal example. I buy our kids’ clothing second-hand and twice a year. But originally, I had not taken care of that financially. Today, when the next season and children’s clothing bazaar arrives (as it just did), I have the money saved up in a kids’ clothing fund and can access the money without any financial stress.
If you want to set up a sinking fund just open up a savings account (if you haven’t already) and transfer the money you need into this new account regularly. Ideally, you set up an automatic savings plan. Essentially, this is the same process you go through when you take care of covering periodic fixed expenses, as we discussed earlier.
Strategies To Save On Fixed Expenses (& Variable Costs)
You can save on fixed expenses by either looking for better deals or cutting costs. We’ve done both and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to save on fixed costs. For example, regularly checking phone plans, insurance policies (or bundling some of those to save), canceling unused subscriptions and questioning if you truly need what you have. That one is hard.
Let’s consider an example: car payments. Today, many families finance cars and go into debt to pay for them. Furthermore, most own two cars, so each partner has access to one. Now it depends: Is it a (financial) priority for you to own two cars and also finance them? Is there an alternative to reducing costs? These kinds of questions triggered an emotional rollercoaster for Marc and me (as I questioned all of our fixed costs, even whether it was really necessary to own an old car). Until I created a values-based budget using values-based sinking funds.
Resources To Further Explore Saving Money On Current Costs
If you have never heard of the values-based budget before, you might want to check out How I Spend My Money On What Matters Most & Skip The Rest and The Ultimate Budget For FIRE: A Frugal Values Based Budget. If you want to learn more about (values-based) sinking funds make sure to read How To Start A Family Budget That Really Works In 7 Easy Steps.
If you want to learn the simple (but not easy) process I used to save a lot on variable costs, I have put together my struggles, learnings and top hacks in these posts:
- Impulse Buying: Its Roots & How To Overcome 3 Main Triggers
- How To Stop Impulse Buying And Save Money In 2 Simple Steps
- How To Save 500 A Month Effortlessly Without Any Sacrifices
Why You NEED a Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet
A “Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet” is a simple but powerful tool to take control of your finances and reach your money goals faster. Typically, it’s a budgeting worksheet printable. Ours is a digital version as a Google Sheets tool you can get a free copy of (more in the last paragraph). Even though this is not a printable budget template, you can also easily print it out and use paper and pen instead of your computer.
Such a monthly budget planner helps you clearly see where your money goes each month. It brings in that awareness (we discussed before) that you need to be successful at creating a simple budget from the start. Because then you can spot spending habits and avoid financial surprises.
The ultimate goal of any fixed and variable expenses worksheet is to support your savings goals and long-term financial planning by making it easier to plan for cuts or adjustments to your budget.
How To Use The Free Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet
After getting your free copy of our budget planner template, the Simple Bare Bones Budget Calculator, you can start to fill in your numbers. As far as you can. Then, you figure out the rest. Finally, I suggest you conduct a monthly review with your partner to get him or her on board. This won’t be easy and will be quite a learning curve for both of you. But it will set you up for success.
You may wonder about the name Simple Bare Bones Budget Calculator. It comes from the original goal I had when creating this worksheet – planning for a time in our family’s life when money was tight due to lower income and higher expenses. I wanted to improve our budget to the point where we could continue to live a comfortable family life on an affordable budget while also saving a lot of money for investments (as we aim to achieve financial independence and early semi retirement). And I did.
Years later, I realized that this budget planner template (which I originally created just for myself after years of failing at budgeting) should have been the first fixed and variable expense worksheet I used.
Get Your Free Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet To Create A Simple Budget
To start the free budget worksheet download click on the image below. If you become a part of the community you can enjoy our full FREE Online Freebies Library and get even more easy-to-follow resources to boost your financial journey and reach your financial goals faster and easier.
What exactly do I get in the “Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet”?
- 1 Sheet to model the budget you expect to have
- 5 Categories for your income streams
- 7 Budget categories for your essential expenses (with several subcategories) to model:
- Current expense – expense goal (you need to enter realistically) = potential savings
- Final result: total Income – expense goals = total potential savings
- Your savings rate calculated as a percentage
- 2 Graphs: a bar chart and a donut showing you how much a budget category accounts for compared to your total income
Bonus: Your Ultimate Fixed and Variable Expenses Worksheet
If you are really serious about budgeting successfully and in detail from the start, I would like to encourage you to use our ultimate Bare Bones Budget Calculator. It includes 3 Sheets for 3 budget years that are combined with each other. At the end of each year the tool calculates what’s left over or missing. Your balance gets transferred from year 1 to year 2 and to year 3. Each of the 3 sheets offers 9 subcategories for all your income streams and 3 overall budget categories: NEED, WANT, INVEST (to put in your totals).
The best part is that you get 1 separate Sheet to split your 3 overall budget categories (NEED, WANT, INVEST) into fixed and variable expenses within 10 subcategories. The Calculator now adds up all of your fixed and variable expenses and visualizes them in a pie chart divided in 2 pieces: fixed and variable expenses. Once you realize how much of your expenses are actually variable you‘re ready to set your first new expense goal. Then the tool calculates your savings per category and adds them up per month and year. Especially, the yearly view is a huge motivator for sticking to your savings goals.
Questioning which NEED is really a survival category will be an AHA-moment as you will see that there might be needs that are actually not set in stone.
Our ultimate Bare Bones Budget Calculator.
I hope this post gave you a new perspective on how to plan your budget more successfully – especially by truly understanding your fixed and variable expenses worksheet. My goal is to make budgeting simple, doable, and empowering – even if you’ve failed before (just like I did!). If you’re ready to take the next step, the free worksheet is just the beginning. I’d love to continue helping you on your journey toward financial clarity and independence. To make sure you don’t miss any future resources, tips, or personal insights, feel free to join the community via the green footer below.
🚀 Now it’s your turn: Which fixed or variable cost surprised you the most?
Or: Do you want me to walk you through a full example using the worksheet?
Let me know in the comments – I read every one!
Title image source: NORTHFOLK on Unsplash
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