Budget categories redux

Okay, so I'm tracking my spending (and income and saving) this month for the first time in a YEAR.

I started by looking at my budget categories from my old, defunct, 2002-2005 budget. Now, I've refined the old categories so I'll be able to track certain things more effectively. I end up with a whopping 24 categories, which is more than I would like, but what the heck.

Here they are:

1. Gross income
2. Savings-retirement
3. Savings-college
4. Savings-other
5. Taxes
6. Flexible Spending Accounts
7. Mortgage
8. Childcare
9. Insurance
10. Utilities
11. Food-groceries
12. Food-restaurant meals
13. Transportation-Mass transit
14. Transportation-Gas and parking
15. Transportation-Car maintenance, repair, and registration
16. Health-medical out-of-pocket expenses
17. Health-fitness
18. Clothing
19. Household and personal supplies
20. House maintenance and repair
21. Entertainment
22. Gifts and holiday spending
23. Personal
24. Donations



A few thoughts and explanations:

5. Taxes. Most of this will be outgo, but tax refunds and the $46 per paycheck in Earned Income Credit that I get will also go in here on the postive side.

6. FSA's. I'm not sure that this one makes sense as a category, but I needed some way to track my income and outgo from these accounts.

7. Mortgage. This is principal, interest, taxes, and homeowner's insurance, and any extra principal payments.

9. Insurance. This is life, health, Rx, car, dental, and vision. Doesn't include homeowners but maybe I'll decide this is too inconsistent and change it.

12. Food-restaurant meals. We'll be dividing this one up further into meals we eat out as a family, my solo meals, and M's solo meals. We did this because M wants to be able to track how much he's spending on work lunches, etc.

19. Household and personal supplies. This category is for stuff like diapers, toothpaste, laundry detergent.

21. Entertainment. This category is for books, event tickets, etc. Does not include restaurant meals.

23. Personal. We used to each have a $100 allowance for whatever little personal things we needed. Now that we're tracking our solo restaurant and coffee shop spending elsewhere, this category may go away. But it's nice to have a small slush fund.

This morning on the train I wrote down all my categories and my spending so far for November in my nifty little ledger I bought at CVS. It was actually really fun. (I should get out more.) I'll report back on how it's going as I go along.


Related posts:
Budget catgegories
Back to the budget dark ages