Budget Categories

[cjsmith]

I started "tracking where every penny goes" in early 2004. (I put that in quotes because there are times I've screwed up; I am currently missing a little over $200. But in the grand scheme of things I'm really not doing all that badly.)

I'm still reworking my categories for expenses. The more accurately they reflect my motivation for buying a thing, the better will be my ability to make budget decisions.

I just created a new category: Social Life. The bottle of wine I bring to a friend's party is not under Groceries:Wine, because I'm not buying it in order to have wine to drink. The pizza I order for the friends watching a movie at my house is not under Dining Out:Dinner, because I never order two large pizzas for dinner. These things are expenditures I make for their value in my social life. When I look at the budget later, instead of saying "Yikes, no more $45 meals", I'll probably say "ah yes, those items there are worth it".

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I hear ya. I started with a spreadsheet, one row per day and one column per category. It was a nice coincidence that when the categories were getting annoyingly multitudinous, TurboTax and Quicken had a deal where you could buy one and get the other nearly for free. Ka-ching!sold! :-)

Tracking encourages me to use credit cards more often and cash less often, because I don't have to write things down myself / keep receipts / etc or risk forgetting. This bias toward plastic would be a minus for some people. So far I'm fine with it.

[johnreen.livejournal.com]

Ka-ching!sold! :-)

Being anti-Windows, that mostly leaves me with GNUCash... although, there are others programs that are relatively simple that would do mostly what I want to do (see how much money I'm actually spending on various things...)

because I don't have to write things down myself / keep receipts / etc or risk forgetting.

I still keep receipts and reconcile them with my monthly CC statement... but maybe I'm anal. I've been eyeballing it up until now ("oh, I remember making that purchase").

The way I do (what amounts to petty) cash is I keep the ATM receipt for the money I took out (which I keep to reconcile that they docked my account correctly), and then I write on the back of that what I spent the money on. I always round up to the nearest dollar (and random change goes in my penny jar... which needs to be taken in now... last time I did it, it was like $150 in change), then when it's gone, I take the receipt out and categorize the expenses... at least, that's what I've started trying to do.