Teen Budget Worksheet
Short answer
Set the money coming in, then set what share goes to each bucket. The tool works out the dollars and tells you what is still unassigned. There is a printable version further down the page for the paper copy that actually gets used.
100 percent
The printable version
Print this page and everything above and below disappears, leaving the worksheet. No email required, because there is no email list.
| Money coming in | Amount |
|---|---|
| Job, after deductions | |
| Allowance | |
| Odd jobs, gifts, other | |
| Total in |
| Where it goes | Amount |
|---|---|
| Save first (before anything below) | |
| Phone, subscriptions, apps | |
| Gas or transit | |
| Food out | |
| Going out | |
| Clothes | |
| Gifts for other people | |
| Anything else | |
| Total out | |
| In minus out |
Save first, and put it on the first line
Nearly every budget worksheet aimed at teenagers puts savings near the bottom, after the spending categories. That ordering guarantees the result, because there is never anything left at the bottom.
Putting it on the first line is not a motivational flourish. It changes what the rest of the sheet is dividing up. The money that gets budgeted is what remains after saving, which means saving is not competing with anything.
Three columns beats twelve
The interactive version has four buckets and the printed one has more, and even that is at the edge of what survives contact with reality.
A teenager tracking twelve categories will track them for nine days. Have to, free, save, give is enough structure to make the trade-offs visible, which is the entire job. Precision is not the goal. Noticing is the goal.
What it looks like
Blake is seventeen and brings in about four hundred a month from a part-time job. The first attempt assigned eighty percent to free spending and twenty to saving, with nothing for the phone bill he had agreed to cover, because he had forgotten about it.
Which is the useful thing that happens with this worksheet. The phone bill did not appear because he thought about it. It appeared because the columns did not add up and he had to find out why.
The second attempt was thirty percent obligations, twenty saving, forty free, ten giving. Not because those numbers are correct, but because they were his and they added to a hundred.
When the sheet stops working
If the money is gone well before the month is, the problem is usually not the budget. It is that some category was set at a number nobody believed, or an expense is missing entirely.
Redo it with last month’s actual spending rather than an estimate. That version is uglier and much more useful, and it is often the point at which a teenager works out something you have been trying to tell them for a year.
If it is going wrong repeatedly, my teen spent all their money covers what tends to be underneath it.
Common questions
Do I need to give an email address to get the printable?
No. There is no email capture on this site at all. Use your browser’s print function on this page and the worksheet prints on its own, with the site navigation stripped out.
What percentages should a teenager use?
The starting split below is a reasonable default, not a rule. What matters far more than the exact percentages is that saving is assigned before spending rather than out of whatever survives the month, because whatever survives the month is usually nothing.
My teenager's income is irregular. Does this still work?
Yes, and it is arguably more useful. Use the lowest recent month as the income figure rather than an average. A plan built on a good month fails in a normal one, and a plan built on a bad month leaves a surplus, which is a much better problem.
Is anything I type saved?
No. It runs entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted or stored.