I try to budget some amount for areas in this category to give me an idea of what I can afford each month, but then I try to stay below the target. These are expenses that I can easily minimize by simply spending less. These can be reoccurring expenses or not, but I tend to put everything that isn’t on auto pilot in here. Categories in this group are:įinally I have a discretionary group, with everything that I might buy on a discretionary basis. Everything I spend gets drawn from that fund and I pay it back when needed over time. I set up a savings category called Irregular expenses to put a small amount of money away for these emergencies. These are things largely out of my control. The Irregular Expenses group is for things I cannot live without or am obligated to deal with, but that don’t happen regularly. I have everything in this group roll over into a slush fund. Everything I have on auto pilot or things I cannot live without. The regular expenses are for things like rent, utilities, payments, and any bills that I have set on a regular schedule.

These line up with my savings account and checking account. I have 4 major groups: Savings, Regular Expenses, Irregular Expenses, and Discretionary. The key point is that categories should separate items by how I spend the money, how I think about spending the money, and how the money actually gets spent. I also try to align my groups with accounts so that I can easily confirm that balances are correct. To me, categories are all about understanding how I can better understand where and how I’m spending money and learning how to control that. I could do it with less categories and more notes, but you can see in my home insurance and utilities sections that I have all the individual ones broken out, and that is only because I find it easier to populate the budget with individual numbers. Susan mentioned in her reply that if there are only 1 or 2 payees for a category she will combine them. However, if we overspend in a discretionary category like Restaurants one month, we tighten up and reduce our spending in the next month or two to put us back on track to our annual goal. For instance, most of our annual insurance payments are due in March, property taxes are split between April and October and we make estimated tax payments 4 times a year. There are some months that just have bigger essential expenses. We monitor the total annual spending amount instead of trying to worry about even monthly spending. We put a 2020 Taxes tag on tax related transactions when they occur. Maybe the logic is that this is an expense that would not be present if we did not own a home. Our categories and groups are set to match Fidelity’s Retirement Planner Budget Worksheet, and Property Taxes are part of the Home Group there.

Quicken home and business 2020 costco