As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s getting to be the time of year where I need to review this year’s budget and start getting ready for next year’s. I personally believe that budgets should be fluid things. Each year, my goal is to take the things that worked and continue them while getting rid of the things that didn’t work.

One of the main places I make changes is in my budget categories, or how I track our spending. I’ve been tracking our spending since around the time we got married (2003), and I am not certain my categories have remained the same for even two years in a row. Sometimes they even change mid-year.

Here are our current categories, the average we have spent each month (Jan-Oct) and the budgeted amount (at the beginning of the year- some values have changed)

Student Loans: 1,087/685

School expenses: 781/850

Bills: 2,183/2,135

Car: 638/190

Credit Cards: 26/15

Groceries: 401/450

Medical: 25/0

Eating Out: 159/150

Allowance – me: 162/125

Allownance – C: 88/75

Pets: 181/0

House: 372/0

Misc: 249/0

MIL: 0/0

Savings: 180/500

 

I’m going to return to this chart a number of times over the next few weeks. Today, I only want to focus on the categories I use.

I don’t like the Credit Card category. It used to be that we carried a balance and this was where I tracked how much we paid each month. But we no longer carry balances, and I track what each charge was to its appropriate category. This year it’s basically been a holding ground for Netflix charges. I think that should get moved into the Bills category.

The other category that gets me is Misc. It bugs me because when I do my year end review, I have to go back and look at my checkbook record to try and figure out what that money was spent on. At the same time, the money this year was mostly spent on the last minute trip I took to NC when my grandmother died. There’s not really another good category to put that in. Other bits are from the Renaissance Faire, which we also plan and save for each year.

At the same time, we save for travel and then pay for all travel expenses out of travel savings, instead of our normal budgeted areas. So maybe both of these things could be moved into a Travel or Vacation category, which, while not perfect, are probably better for me remembering what the money went toward than Misc.

I talked before about how I want to move the dog food and dog treat expenses from the grocery budget to the pet budget. This is mostly because we now have a roommate, JZ, who will be chipping in for food. It doesn’t make sense to ask him to pay for pet supplies, too, though he would.

So not many changes, but a couple. I’ll get rid of one category altogether- credit cards, and change the Misc category to Travel/Vacation. I think everything should work out.

On Thursday, I’ll talk about the dollar amounts assigned to each category and if/how/why I’ll be changing them.