yearly expenses

DireEmblem

I have most pots on Starling for convenience.  They are mostly to average ad-hoc costs down to a simple monthly budget.

1. Annual Bills collection account
2. Holiday Budget account.
3. Birthday & Xmas present fund.
4. Weekly spend account (Money is transferred in here each wage, and then redistributed weekly to my 'daily spending' bank card to cover food, socialising and 'treats'.  It means that I can always clearly see my main bank account is running at a balance sufficient to cover all the monthly bills.

My emergency savings is split between Virgin, NSI and Marcus.  Thats for two reasons - so its not all stuck with one counterpart should I need access and one of their systems has an outage, and to blend a better interest rate.

Grabs39

Christmas goes into the work Credit Union.  Holiday goes into a savings account alongside our joint bank account.  Other savings go into the joint savings account and large bills or expenses come out of there.  It’s not the most accurate way to monitor it though.

Linton

thegentleway said:

Linton said:

I dont use expenditure pots at all.  Expenditure is managed by keeping detailed categorised records (updated mostly automatically every week) on everything we spend.  It is easy to check if the total is beyond plan or excess is being spent in particular areas.

How do you do it automatically?

Log in to bank account and click download statement to OFX format.  This starts up MS Money which picks up the data and categorises almost all of it to things like food, off license, takeaway, household, petrol, state pension etc based on the name of the payee/payer when that name has been seen before.  A couple of clicks on MsMoney will produce an annual statement by category giving, for example, monthly income and expenditure.

Jami74

dd95 said:

what pots do people use for things like holidays, birthdays, xmas etc?

Currently have a marcus account and pay around 200 a month in for the above in addition to my emergency fund and s and s ISA - do you do similar or just take from investment accounts?

You might get quite different answers if you asked on the Debt Free Wannabe board.
I wanted to have separate accounts for different pots but haven't managed to make it work that well. I originally started with Natwest and RBS cash builder accounts for 'Christmas' and 'Holiday' and a First Direct regular saver for 'Car'. It then got complicated though because I started chasing the best interest rates, so now I have little bits of money in different accounts earning little bits of interest and none of the amounts quite equal individual pots. I keep track with a spreadsheet.
Now that I have no debt and an income that is slightly bigger than outgoings, having pots doesn't feel quite so important. I am moving towards just putting 1/12th of my annual expenses aside each month. I like the idea of spreading it across 4 regular savers timed to mature every 3 months.
I'm a long way from being in a position to invest (still paying rent) and my jiggling of accounts for small amounts of interest probably wouldn't be worth it for most on this board but every pound I earn in interest is a pound I don't have to work for.

Rich1976

We used to have separate accounts for about half a dozen categories but it all became a bit of a faff. Then I tried just having one account  for everything but would use a separate tab on my spreadsheet to keep a record for each category but would end up forgetting to log withdrawals or adhoc deposits so the balances on the spreadsheet never tied back to the actual account balance.
So now we have just one account that is home to our 8 months emergency Fund, holiday savings, annual expenses such as insurance and any repairs or replacement items needed. On my budget spreadsheet I just have a line designated to 'savings' and this seems to work. I know roughly how much we need for a holiday as well as how  much all the annual expenses roughly are based on last year so as long as we save approximately 1/12 of the total of all of these and dont spend silly amounts because we have the money sitting there, it is working quite well.
Happily it has taken a lot of stress out of trying to manage separate pots.

kimwp

I just keep my normal monthly outgoings so low compared to my income with the excess going into savings accounts that if I have a larger spend eg annual expenses, holiday spend, cat illness (one of them is aiming for 1K is vet bills at the moment) then I know that I can afford it. So rather than tracking pots (though I do check all accounts to make sure nothing untoward has happened), I track and control my expenditure.

ChilliBob

Linton said:

thegentleway said:

Linton said:

I dont use expenditure pots at all.  Expenditure is managed by keeping detailed categorised records (updated mostly automatically every week) on everything we spend.  It is easy to check if the total is beyond plan or excess is being spent in particular areas.

How do you do it automatically?

Log in to bank account and click download statement to OFX format.  This starts up MS Money which picks up the data and categorises almost all of it to things like food, off license, takeaway, household, petrol, state pension etc based on the name of the payee/payer when that name has been seen before.  A couple of clicks on MsMoney will produce an annual statement by category giving, for example, monthly income and expenditure.

I'm loving the sound of that, I'll see if I can do it with NatWest. 

When people do this over say monthly periods what do you do with stuff you return? E. G. Say you bought a bunch of suits (yeah, them things from years ago, before Covid and casual dress codes), and returned them but the return came the month later calendar wise?

I guess you can have cumulative months and try to have a, pause each year after Christmas returns or something? 

AlanP_2

I use MsMoney but haven't automated the updating via statements, preferring to do it manually from receipts, I can achieve a finer level of detail this way e,.g. supermarket receipt can be split across Food, Clothes, Housewares etc. depending on the items purchased.

It is less helpful now than it was years ago when we got married and started paying for "life", and money was tight but what we have always done is have a Bills Account. 1/12th of estimated annual spend on bills, car services, holidays, gifts etc. moved across each month so that spending was smoothed across the year. Still do it from habit, but don't worry if we overspend on any of the categories now (holidays being the main one), just pay for it from a different account. 

marycanary

I use YNAB (You Need A Budget) it costs about £36/y but it has totally revolutionised my spending and saving. The savings categories I use are Car, Christmas, Emergency, Holiday and Home Improvements. I set savings goals and add that amount to my savings every month. I have a savings account and a couple of regular saver.  It doesn't matter where the money is held it is tracked through YNAB. If I take anything back I just delete that spending,

When I has debts I used it to track paying them off. Now I use it to track investments, total networth etc.

I probably don't need YNAB now and could go back to a spreadsheet but it is very easy to use so it is likely I will pay for another year.
Mary