Annual Budget Overview

A year is a different question from a month

A monthly budget answers whether this month works. It cannot show you that the car costs nothing for eight months and then a great deal in two, which is the pattern that actually breaks budgets.

Reading across the row

Each row is one category across twelve months. The irregular ones announce themselves immediately — insurance, birthdays, the boiler service — and those are exactly the ones a monthly sheet hides.

Fill it in backwards first

The fastest way to use it is to complete last year from statements before planning this one. A guessed annual budget is a wish; a measured one is a plan.

What goes in each column

• Category — down the left. Keep the list short enough to read in one look; twelve to sixteen rows works better than thirty.
• Jan to Dec — one figure per month per category.
• Total — the year for that category, which is the number worth knowing.
• Read across a row to find the irregular costs, and down a column to find the expensive months. Those two readings are the reason this is a grid and not a list.

Printing it

Choose A4 or US Letter before you download and the table is laid out to fit that sheet — column widths are shares of the page, not fixed millimetres, so nothing is cut off at the right-hand edge. Alternate row shading can be turned off if you are photocopying in black and white, where a pale tint sometimes reproduces as a muddy grey. If you need more than one page, set the page count before downloading rather than printing the same PDF twice; the pages are then numbered, which matters the moment two of them get separated.