THANK YOU for taking the time to create a wonderful tool for us Dave Ramsey folks to get out of debt!!!

Debbie (Connecticut)

Dustin’s spreadsheet is pretty incredible and we are honored to host it for him.

Cheers!
the Dad

Good luck on your journey!!

Good luck!
Thomas

On very last column of the budget entry page (column AB) (it is yellow) there is an option to assign each budget category to a living expense, a savings account, a sinking fund, etc.. Just go down to your Christmas, Birthday, Vacation, whatever item you are saving for and tell it to be a “sinking fund”

Once you have done this then there is a special page that keeps tract of the balances. It is called “Sinking Funds” there is a drop down box (filter) in cell D6 that lets you only look at the items you have deemed as sinking funds. There is a current balance and a monthly entry cell for each item you have called a sinking fund.

Now…. Once you actually deposit, transfer, cash the money you want to save for your sinking fund you must enter it in your ‘monthly check register’ page so that your budget will balance. What happens then is if you have labeled the item a sinking fund then it treats it like a deposit and pushes the balance to the sinking fund page. And you will notice that your sinking fund page page balance should go up when you enter an entry in monthly check register.

Finally… when you do actually spend the money from the sinking fund just enter how much you spent on the “Sinking Funds” page under the correct month (enter a positive amount) this will draw down the appropriate balance, but it will not effect your monthly budget items (ie. budget entry page & budget departure page)

Hope all that makes sense, it really is pretty simple once you set it up.

Dustin

I have a question for you. I got to your page from the My TTMO boards. I am working on our budget using Dustin’s excel workbook (so awesome!!). Some of the categories in our budget are not used every month (for example Christmas). Is there somewhere in the workbook that carries the balance left over each month?

(For example if we are budgeting $100 out of each check for Christmas starting in January, then by November there should be $1100 set aside. Problem is I have several categories that I don’t pay each month as to build a balance to pay out later (insurance, etc.). I cannot keep track of this in my checking account with out opening a separate account for each category… which I think would be a huge pain.)

I was just hoping since you have the link on your page, maybe you are using the budget yourself and have figured out how to solve this. If you could e-mail me that would be very helpful: [hidden for privacy]

This is probably not the page to ask you a question like this but I just couldn’t find anywhere else to post this or e-mail you. Thank you in advance.