When putting together a financial budget, using online budget planners can help. Financial budgets are relatively simple in practice, but in order to get the most out of your financial budget, it’s best to build on the experience of others. Most financial budgets consist of merely a column for expenses and a column for income. But more advanced financial budgets can give you better snapshots of your financial situation as well as provide invaluable budget calculators that can help you map out your road to meeting your financial goals.

Before you begin, gather the following items:

• Monthly credit card statements
• Monthly bills
• Mortgage information
• Checking and savings account statements
• Paystubs
• Last year’s tax return

Most financial budgets and online budget planners require you to enter in a bit of information. Gathering these documents beforehand will speed along the process.

Next, you’ll want to choose a type of online budget planner. Here are a few ideas:

Online Services

Some online services can do all the legwork for you by retrieving your transaction data and crunching all the numbers automatically. Sites like Mint.com, JustThrive.com and Quicken Online can do this for you. However, you will have to enter your password and credit card numbers into the system. This poses somewhat of a security concern, but your accounts should be equally as safe as they are when you log in directly.  This saves you the hassle of entering in all your transactions by hand.

Downloadable Spreadsheets

A great place to start is to download a financial budget spreadsheet. You can get templates from Google Docs or you can check out other sites such as AARP to get sample financial budget spreadsheets. You can download these to your hard drive and enter transactions and information electronically (recommended) or you can print them off and do them by hand. By keeping your online budget planners on your computer, you can also run hypothetical numbers to get projections of your income if you were to get a raise or if a spouse were to quit working.

Online Budget Calculators

Not sure where to begin? Online budget calculators can help. For example, Mappingyourfuture.org has an online budget calculator that lets you enter your gross earnings and it’ll automatically factor in your withholdings and figure out your monthly net income. Then you can enter in your estimated expenses such as housing, utilities, grocery items and more. The budget calculator will then tell you how much leftover discretionary income you have and show you your annual income, too. This is a great starting point as it gives you a quick snapshot of your earnings.

Beginning a financial budget isn’t something you have to do from scratch. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you can use online budget planners and get started on the important work right away. Avoid calculation errors and cluttered spreadsheets by leveraging the work of others. Get organized with you financial budget by using online budget planners.