What are your categories?

enthusiasticsaver

I have to say that I try to keep categories as simple as possible as that is the easiest and quickest way for me to record spending - I use my phone which then syncs with my ipad on a spending tracker app and the expenditure categories I use are as follows:


Council Tax
Utilities - water, gas, electric
Communications - telephone landline, broadband and mobiles
TV subscription (sky) and tv licence (paid annually)
Insurances
Investments and savings
Household maintenance and diy
Furniture and large household items
Personal spending for OH (he does not record it explicitly as not as MSE inclined
Clothes
Food and household cleaning products - supermarket shopping etc
Medical and beauty - toiletries, haircuts, dental treatments, manicures etc
Entertainment and leisure subscriptions including gym subscriptions
Eating out and takeaways
Holidays and weekends away
Car maintenance and petrol, bridge tolls, parking etc
Other travel - train tickets, flights
Christmas and birthday gifts etc, charities


That is personal for me though as we no longer have a mortgage or any debt outstanding. Many people I know though like to break it down further and also have other categories like rent, mortgage and debt repayments. My spending app automatically arranges the categories in order of most used which is usually food as that has more entries than any other!

sexyshark

well just rechecked it and missed a couple of things off so now it is down to £303

RosaBernicia

I have a lot of categories as I put in everything I might want to track later - I'll probably prune them a bit when I get round to having a new year review.

Household (rent, ctax, insurance)
Utilities (all bills, this could probably go under household)
Rainy day funds (car, gifts, pets, dental)
Pre YNAB Debt
Savings goals (holidays, buffer fund)
Everyday expenses (groceries, cash, could probably also put these under household)
Entertainment (eating out, cinema, books, music)
Personal care (hair, skin, make-up, etc)
Healthcare (prescriptions etc)
Travel
Pet care
Study costs
Work related costs


I started with the YNAB ones and shuffled them a bit to match my old spreadsheet - now that I am more confident using YNAB I think I could do with adapting it more for my own way of doing things.

HTH



RB xx

getmore4less

Depends on the goal
If you want to understand where your money goes
Do annual totals for each category.

If the number is big split the category.
Try not to have essential and discretionary items in the same category.
Eg separate food and booze.

Start with all the things you spent money on in 2014.

Detail gives you the information you need to budget properly.

getmore4less

sexyshark wrote: »

well just rechecked it and missed a couple of things off so now it is down to £303

Go back and review 2014 do annual totals for everything.

cydney65

As said above there will be as many different categories as people, it depends on what works for you. Go through your bank statement for categories and make educated guesses for certain things if necessary. It can be easily tweaked as you go along.

I have my budget organised into weeks as I get paid all over the spot. So I have week 1 and all the categories which need to be covered that week, then week 2 etc. YNAB has saved me loads of money and has been the only budgeting system that has worked for me.

Best of luck.

CydneyX