Best Budget Templates - Student Funding

Best Student Budget Templates

During National Student Money Week, we ran a competition to find the best Student Budget Templates. Our three winners are:

Trung Vu
Ng Jing Wen
Jerry George Jaimon

Below you can find a blank template for each budget planner as well as an example version to show you how to fill it in.

Yearly Planner (Trung Vu)

This template is great for planning your budget at the start of the year. It breaks your expenses down into different categories and gives you space to put your regular (e.g. Maintenance Loan) and irregular income (e.g. part-time work). It also gives you space to track savings, and you can see these accumulating over time. You could also use this template to track your spending by creating a copy of the template and adding in how much you have spent on each category at the end of the month.

Plan and Track Spending (Ng Jing Wen)

This template is a bit more complicated, but it allows you to plan your budget at the start of the year and also track your expenses as you go along. The "Yearly Overview" tab is where you make your plan. You can add in when you expect income (i.e. Maintenance Loan, part-time work) and also plan your monthly budget to check you will have enough income to cover your costs. Create a copy of the "Monthly Template" to track your expenses as you go along. Add your expenses into the table on the left and by selecting a "Head Category" and "Sub Category", the table on the right will automatically track how much you've spent in the different types. Make sure you input the expenses as a minus figure. You can use this to check that you are keeping on track against your yearly overview.

All-in-One Planner (Jerry George Jaimon)

This template allows you to plan your budget and track your expenses on the same sheet. First, make a copy of the template and set your budget in the table on the left and input your income and any additional savings for the month. Then, input your expenses as you go along and select the expense type from the "Category" column. The table on the right will then show a running total of how much you've spent on the different categories. If you overspend on any, the "Overbudget" column will tell you and will turn red, so you know to reduce your spending on that category.