Larry Burkett published The Financial Planning Workbook: A Family Budgeting Guide in 1990 as part of his Christian Financial Concepts series, and it has held up because a written household budget has not changed much in thirty years. This is not a book you read once and shelve. It is a stack of worksheets you fill in with your own numbers and use every month.
What’s Actually In It
The workbook walks through the categories most families need to track: income, giving, housing, food, transportation, debt, insurance, and savings. Burkett built the system around percentage guidelines, so you are not just recording what you spent, you are comparing it against a target for each category. There is a section for setting up a giving plan before anything else gets budgeted, which is the book’s clearest statement of priorities.
The Biblical Angle
Burkett does not spend much time on theology here. He cites Proverbs and a handful of stewardship passages, then gets back to the worksheets. The assumption running underneath the whole book, stated plainly rather than argued at length, is that a budget is one of the more concrete ways a man can act on the belief that what he has is not fully his own.
Who It’s For
If you have never written a full household budget before, this gives you the categories and the math without requiring an app or a subscription. Couples who work through it together will get more out of it than someone filling it in alone, since half the value is the conversation it forces about where the money actually goes.
Our Take
It is dated in places (no mention of digital banking, obviously), but the framework itself is sound and the worksheets are still usable as-is. If you want a paper-based system with clear categories and a stewardship foundation, this is a solid, no-frills choice.
Get your copy of The Financial Planning Workbook: A Family Budgeting Guide today!