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'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that I don't go back and recategorize old expenses when I make up a new category. This time, I recategorized a few pizzas and that's it. It makes things less clean when I look back more than, say, a year, but it also makes it easy enough to make a new category that I actually do it.

Now I just need to get rid of all the categories Quicken makes for me that I will never ever use. Of course, now I can't think of an example! :-)