Hi all! My spouse and I are starting to plan for a major life change - he is changing careers, and we will go from two incomes to one income, and then back to two (but at a different income level) as he finds traction in his new career.
I have a household budgeting sheet that I have used for years very successfully, but curious if there’s a template that is already baked in to Tiller.
Are there existing templates that I can use to plan out what our future budget should look like, so we can evaluate needed income (and vice versa - what can we do with one income)?
It’s great you are wanting to plan ahead for what your anticipated future budget will look like. I’m not aware of any specific future budget planning template. However, you can have up to 5 Tiller templates linked to your account. You can create an additional main Tiller template with a unique name for planning out your future budget. Input your anticipated Categories of income and expenses projected over the first year in the Categories tab. Use the Yearly Budget tab to view what your future income and expense will look like per month and for the year. This also has the advantage of getting that template ready for when you begin to make the official changes.
Though not designed specifically for a change like this, Budget Plan includes lots of tools to help with budgeting, hopefully some of them could be useful for this new undertaking!
Maybe I’m underthinking what you really need but we had same life scenario over last 3 years and I used the out of the box Categories sheet just fine for this since you can track income separately for each of you. Our scenarios all over last 3 years:
Dual Income, to
Bread winner (her); no income (me), to
Bread winner (me); no income (her), to
Bread winner (her); retired (me)
If all of this change is happening within 2026, the existing Categories sheet should work just fine since you have income for each of you projected out by month and the built-in budget templates will simply reflect what you have in Categories. If you think this will roll over to 2027, then add next year to your existing Categories sheet and project out through 2027.
I did the latter and then built a separate “Annual Budgets” sheet because I wanted to project out several years of budgeting with some assumptions. I ultimately took this out until expected death because I was bored so I have a projected budget amount at the annual level for several years. Basically, it’s just your Categories sheet rolled up to the year level using current year as the baseline. Not perfect but it gives me some directional forecasting.
