Budget

Check out our budget on Google Sheet.

Note there are multiple tabs at the bottom, organizing things by category. Everything is summarized on the Master tab.

We use this budget to track cost projections.

Expense Log

For the actuals, we track those in a separate Expense Log. I am not sharing this sheet, but here is a snapshot to give you an idea of what it looks like, if you are trying to set something similar up.

The Num column refers to the file name of the receipt image/file, which we keep in a shared drive.

By having the category column defined, we can create a pivot table to easily see actual expenses for the whole project, grouped by category.

Budget Related Posts

Defining the Budget 4 min read

Wed, Apr 17, 2019 — I’ve struggled putting together a realistic budget for this build. There is still so much that is variable, it’s hard to lock things down and know where we stand. Given what we’ve learned over the last few weeks, we are probably back to doing the foundation ourselves, which means going with ICF (material costs going up, but labor costs going way down). I will explain those details in another article, but that’s just one example of how much is changing with the budget. Keep reading →

Financing 7 min read

Tue, Dec 5, 2017 — Financing a vacant piece of land is not easy. If you are trying to get a loan for such a purchase, they are called lot loans. Many banks, at least at the time, were not offering such loans. For the ones that were, they were often adjustable rate, high interest, and required large down payments. Given that we had increased the budget on the land so much, having this higher than expected interest rate was causing some anxiety. Keep reading →