Ultimate 60/20/20 Budget Spreadsheet Template for Google Sheets & Excel

Six income lines totalled, then the three buckets with their allocation percentages beside them - and those percentages are cells you can change rather than figures baked into the file. That matters more than it sounds. Sixty, twenty and twenty is a convention, not a fact about anyone's circumstances: a household with a large rent in an expensive city cannot make the living bucket fit sixty percent no matter how it economises, and a template that insisted on it would produce a permanently failing budget. Being able to set the split to what your position actually allows turns the sheet from a test into a plan. Each target is the percentage applied to your total income, so both inputs feed straight through to the three figures beneath.

The bucket that decides whether the whole split works, with its categories, what you planned for each, what you actually spent, the variance in money and the variance as a percentage. The percentage variance column earns its place on this sheet in particular. Rent going over by fifty is a rounding error on a large line; a small category going over by fifty may have doubled. The money column ranks them the wrong way round and the percentage column corrects it.

Savings, investing and debt payoff, tracked the same way - planned against actual with both variance figures. Separating this bucket from the rest is what stops it being the flexible one. Money that has not been assigned tends to get spent, and a bucket with its own sheet, its own target and its own variance is considerably harder to quietly borrow from.

Discretionary spending, on the same planned-against-actual footing. It is the bucket most likely to absorb a bad month, and having it tracked separately is what shows whether it did. A month that came in on target overall while the flexible bucket ran to nothing is a different month from one that simply worked.

Living expenses by category across the year, with the totals along each row and down each column. A single month tells you what happened; twelve tell you what is normal. The categories that move with the season and the ones that only ever creep upward look identical in March and quite different across a full year.

Total income and the three bucket figures, a goals rate, and an over-or-under figure - alongside the comparison the whole workbook is built for: your target percentage against your actual percentage for each bucket, with the money beside it. Setting the two percentages side by side is more useful than either alone. The money figures tell you what happened; the percentages tell you what shape your spending has, and that shape is what stays constant when your income changes. Two charts plot the split.