Budget categories

Now that I've resolved to start budgeting again, I'm kind of excited.

I'm starting with my old budget categories that I used until November 2005 when I fell off the wagon. Here they are, with a brief explanation, and a monthly average from 2005.

Mortgage. Total payments, including principal, interest, and insurance.
2005 numbers: $565/month. This doesn't include any extra payments we made. Those went under "savings."

Household. This category needs work. It ended up being a catch-all for everything from diapers, toothpaste, and laundry detergent, to small house repairs and new appliances, to clothing and anything else that didn't fit into another category. Whew!
2005 average: a whopping $662/month.

Groceries. All food except restaurant meals. Does not include household supplies like bar soap and toilet paper.
2005 average: $495/month. We budgeted $400/month so you can see this was an area where we were weak.

Utilities. Electric, gas, land lines, cell phones, and water.
2005 average: $335/month.

Entertainment. This category needs work, too. This included restaurant meals, gifts, books, music, etc.
2005 average: $291/month. The budget said $200, so we were naughty here too.

Childcare. Mostly daycare tuition, with the occasional small expense like paying our babysitting co-op's annual membership dues, etc.
2005 average: $710/month.

Transportation. Gas, car repairs and maintenance, parking, and mass transit.
2005 average: $347/month.

Medical. Co-pays, drugs, all out-of-pocket medical and dental expenses.
2005 average: $210/month. It was an expensive year because my partner needed chiropractic treatments and sinus surgery.

Insurance. Health, dental, vision, car, life, and homeowners.
2005 average: $400/month.

Personal. This category is basically mad money for my partner and I to spend on whatever we want. This is where we put solo restaurant meals, like work lunches, coffee, etc.
2005 average: $200. The budget was $200 ($100 each per month), and miraculously we were right on target.

Donations. All charitable contributions.
2005 average: $136/month.

Travel. My biggest passion (or weakness, depending on whether I'm in a half-empty or a half-full kind of mood.) This included airline tix, hotel stays, rental cars, basically anything we wouldn't have spent if we stayed home.
2005 average: $358/month.


Total average monthly spending in 2005: $4709.


I also tracked the following:

Savings. All contributions to retirement accounts, college accounts, and liquid savings accounts, minus the (eh-hem) withdrawals from savings that we made at various points. This number is unusually high because we received a sizeable money gift from one of my relatives at the end of 2004, and we were still portioning it out to various savings vehicles in January of 2005. If you want to know more about this money gift, read this post.
2005 average: gain of $767/month.

Income. This is where my method gets really wacky and needs to be fixed. In this category I tracked deposits to my accounts, so that means I was really tracking take-home pay (plus reimbursements, gifts, tax refunds, etc). When I revamp this whole system, I need to track gross income and have a separate budget category for taxes. This method made everything too skewed, because I was tracking my income after taxes but many of my expenses (health care, mass transit, retirement contributions, etc) were pre-tax and never made it into my take-home pay. So looking at my outgo and my income side-by-side never added up right. I'm not even going to tell you what my 2005 average was because it was such a wacked and useless number.

Okay, there you have it. I am going to start now, in November 2006, just tracking and not trying to budget. After tracking for a couple of months we may try to impose some realistic restrictions.

In a subsequent post, I'll list my new budget categories.

Thanks, BTW, for the comments on my last post about your budget methods. I'm glad I'm not the only one who gave up on Quicken, and it's nice to hear about other Luddites who use paper and pencil. I think after a couple months of paper I will probably be happy to go back to Excel, but for now, paper is how I'm getting myself started again.