By Lisa Hannam
For this week’s No More Ls column, we’re looking at budgeting spreadsheet templates and if they’re worth the cost to download.
If your FYP is stacked with finfluencers, financial apps, and vlogs about couponing or “buy the dip,” you are familiar with the “download my budgeting template” post. If not, your feed may soon ask you to pay anywhere from $5 to $35 to download an Excel spreadsheet—or even more to subscribe to an accountability group or a spending-tracker app. Admittedly, after seeing many of these same accounts talk about “passive income,” using templates as easy examples to make extra cash, I couldn't help but think, “Can’t I just make one myself?”
I asked two Canadian personal finance experts what they think of this newish social media trend, how we can DIY our budgets, and if they would pay for a template.
What is the budget template trend all about?
The skeptical view is that the trend is just a way for some people to make money from economic anxiety. It’s a form of passive income, which is making money with little to no work, once you “set it and forget it.” Who doesn’t want that, right? Financial influencers can create a template using Excel or Google Sheets and then charge a fee for their followers to download it from their link-in-bio.
According to Google Trends, “passive income” searches in Canada peaked in December 2021, back when inflation rates (4.8%) were abnormally high. And around when rates started to rise, there was a ground-up spike in “budget template” searches. A couple of years later we saw the “loud budgeting” trend, introduced by Lukas Battle in a Tiktok video that’s now at 1.6 million views. With uncertainty around fiscal policy (the efforts from the Canadian government to positively impact the economy) and tariffs, it makes sense to me that Canadians are looking for guidance and tools to better manage their money.
What’s in a budget template?
Typically the bones are around listing expenses and how that totals up to your income, with the goal being to widen the gap to save more money. To differentiate themselves from the countless budgeting templates out there, some worksheets will be set up for monthly or weekly budgeting or with formats for mobile. They can include household expenses, short-term goals (like planning for a wedding or vacation) and anything else you can think of.
What you can expect from a budgeting tool
Budgeting is a smart way to know where your money is going now by logging your expenses, so you can start to plan where you actually want your money to go in the future.
You can budget with a goal-setting notebook, a snazzy app that allows you to take snapshots of receipts, or a downloaded template from your favourite influencer, but the most popular way to build a budget is to create columns in a good ol’ spreadsheet, like Excel or Google Sheets. And these straightforward budget spreadsheets are favoured by finance experts, too.
If you decide to try a paid template, before you click download, know what you’re getting and consider whether it’s truly something you will use. Ask for a preview. Check the reviews. Find out if there are instructions on how to use it.
You can also use a do-it-yourself budget. Budgeting templates are neither a service nor a utility, says Rob Carrick, a personal finance expert and author of Rob Carrick’s Substack. And you shouldn’t believe anyone claiming they’ve built something revolutionary. He suggests a budget is something you can create yourself—without using someone else’s template. “This isn’t some great invention shared with the world to make life better. It’s a business. Someone is selling stuff to make money, and they’re trying to convince you that this is the answer for your personal finances.” He doesn’t see a wide variation between the budgeting templates and apps, he says.
Kenneth Doll, a financial planner with AlbertaFinancialPlanner.ca, says a budgeting tool shouldn’t be complicated. And if it is, that may deter you from actually using it.
How to make your own budgeting tool for free
“The homemade, freebie version might be the better bargain,” says Carrick, who suggests that building it out can be an effective way to learn “the limitations and benefits of budgeting, when you haven’t spent a cent on it.”
Be specific when logging everything you spend, Doll says. “Don’t just input a column of ‘miscellaneous’ spending. If you have a miscellaneous spending column with $500, how can you trim that down?” And track yourself for three to six months (Carrick suggests the same). “That will show you your patterns.”
Another caveat: timing. If your goal is to save money this year, January and February may not be the best months to start tracking, suggests Carrick. He sees these months as holiday hangover months, when we’re catching up on bills, spending more time at home, less likely to travel. Our spending habits are atypical at this time of the year. He recommends tracking in the summer, when your spending may be at its highest and you can gain more insight into your spending trends and habits.
What if you don’t want to budget?
Not everyone loves budgeting, and you don’t need to do it all the time. It can seem restrictive, a lot of work, and even disappointing if your budget is unrealistic. Both Carrick and Doll instead use spreadsheets to track spending when they need to check in on their own finances, especially when their goals, lifestyle or life stage change.
Carrick also suggests working another key concept into a budget, even when you’re just tracking : Pay yourself first. This means, before spending, ensure that you’ve got money directed toward your savings.
But is it worth it? Can you build your own?
Would Carrick pay for a template? “Oh, hell no. I made a budget sitting at my desk after dinner.”
What about Doll, would he pay? “No. One of my clients asked me what’s the best app to get, and I said the best app is an Excel spreadsheet. That’s what I use.”
If you build out a template yourself, that’s one expense you don’t have to log.
But they both agree that what works for them may not work for you. And like anything you pay for, it only has value if you use it. If you download a budgeting template, look at it, keep procrastinating instead of filling it out, then you’ve made a donation to someone who’s happily earning that passive income you read about up top. On the other hand, if you’re motivated to use a template precisely because you paid good money for it, that’s good value. Carrick says: “If you find a superb one that has all the contingencies and features you need and it’s going to be a big problem solver for you, I could see buying it.” And if he were to recommend a budgeting app, he points to YNAB (which stands for You Need a Budget).
Before you give over your credit card details, Doll suggests thinking of a budget template as akin to a membership at the gym: “The membership is not going to help you lose weight or get in better shape. What will help you lose weight is by going to the gym and using it.”
Lisa Hannam is an award-winning editor and journalist, and she is the Editor-in-Chief of The Get. She has previously been at the helm of celebrated Canadian publications, including MoneySense. She completed the Canadian Securities Course in 2024.
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