📈 UAE Budgeting: Our custom budget tracking tool
- Kacper Duda
- Jan 15
- 3 min read
January is a good time to look at the year ahead and do some financial planning. Last week, we covered goal setting to give you a better understanding of your financial needs in 2025.
To help you implement your plans, this week we look at setting up a monthly budget and tracking against it throughout the year. We do this using our FREE budget tracker, which we designed specifically for life in the UAE.
Why is budgeting important?
Monthly budgeting allows you to control your expenditure vs. your income. In short, it ensures that you balance your income with your cost of living, whilst ideally keeping some spare funds at the end of the month as savings.
Budgeting also brings financial well-being benefits. Research shows that 62% of individuals with a house budget feel more in control, with over half also feeling more confident and secure about their finances.
Simple budgeting steps
People use a variety of apps, spreadsheets or paper-based approaches to budgeting. With our UAE budgeting tool, we wanted to make the process as simple as possible. Remember, you can always download it for free and have a play for yourself.
1. Understanding your household income
When thinking about our incomes, we often only consider salaries or profits from a business and think of our own income primarily. It is more effective to look at budgeting from a household perspective, so consider all incomes and expenses.
Don't forget to capture any rental income or interest on savings, as well as bonuses and anything else that brings money into the household during the year. These can be included as a custom income category.
2. Setting your monthly budget
It's good to have an idea of what your monthly expenditure looks like - that's where a monthly budget comes in.
You can use your past spending habits to drive this and determine how much, on average, you will aim to spend in each of the categories. You should also classify whether the spend is mandatory (such as rent or school fees) or whether it's a nice-to-have, lifestyle expense.
Combined with your household income information, you will quickly be able to see how much of your income you are spending and whether the spend is mandatory or discretionary. Ideally, you will see an amount left over, i.e. your savings.
3. Monthly tracking
To know how well you're doing against your monthly budget, you will need to look at your actual expenses. We recommend you do this at least once a month, or more often if your situation demands it.
You will need to copy/paste your expenses from your card statements and apply a category to each. These will be compared against your budget and you will quickly see where you over- or underspent, as well as where your biggest expenses were.
With that knowledge, you'll know where to pay more attention next month or, perhaps, where you can allow yourself more freedom.
4. Reviews and adjustments
Months will vary in terms of spend, savings and sometimes income - that's totally normal. You do want to catch trends as early as possible though, so you can adjust accordingly.
It helps therefore to look at averages across the months. The 'year in review' functionality provides you with a high-level overview of income, expenses and savings, and allows you to reflect on areas for improvement.
Where can I download the budget tracker?
You can download it completely free over here. The tracker works with Google Sheets, so you will not need to install any additional software. Just make a copy, and start editing!
Happy budgeting!
Disclaimer: Please bear in mind that this email does not constitute financial advice. Any choices you make you are solely responsible for. We always aim to provide highest quality, independent views but do your own research to ensure you’re comfortable with any changes you make to your personal finances.
