Budgeting Categories

Personal Finance Money & Budgeting
1

We’ve been doing some digging into how people budget on Emma and we’ve found that these are our most used budgeting categories:

:bookmark_tabs: Bills
:shopping: Shopping
:house_with_garden: Housing
:tomato: Groceries

Can anyone guess what the 5th and 6th most popular budgeting categories are? :eyes:

2

Eating out and shopping?

3

Good guesses, but…

Shopping is our 2nd most popular

Eating out is our 7th!

4

The perils of only glancing at a topic and overlooking shopping :crazy_face::see_no_evil:
Can’t believe eating out is only 7th… maybe investment then seeing Emma users are money-savvy :rofl:

5

Yesss investment is our 5th most popular budgeting category! :raised_hands:

And transport is 6th :red_car:

Which categories would you put in your top 5?

The 5 categories that are most important to me are probably:

:bookmark_tabs: Bills
:rocket: Savings
:tomato: Groceries
:shopping: Shopping
:red_car: Eating out

6

Didn’t think transport was 6th seeing people still work from home, but a clear sign things are changing :sunglasses:

:house: Housing
:poultry_leg: Groceries and :receipt:Bills and :moneybag: Investment
:heart_eyes_cat: Pet stuff

:point_up:t3:These are usually my top categories :sunglasses:
Birthday months tend to add either :gift: Gifts and :european_post_office: Shopping into the mix.

7

I thought that my budgeting categories were all the same every month but looking back, they change quite a bit. My top 5 would be

:house_with_garden: Housing
:moneybag: Bills
:broccoli: Groceries
:skull_and_crossbones: One offs
:earth_africa: World Changing

I vote that we change the Groceries logo to :poultry_leg:

1 Like
8

I fear a vegetarian and vegan uproar :rofl:

Love the one-off category… it has the potential to be literal killer for the overall budget :skull_and_crossbones::grin:

2 Likes
9

Interesting that you’ve both put Housing as #1 - what kind of things fall under this category?

At the moment I lump my rent in with the bills category, but now i’m questioning why I haven’t put this as housing lol

10

Yeah, it’s just rent for me.
I would assume people with a mortgage would add this instead.

Also, if I had a mortgage and needed to do any repairs on the house, I might use housing for these too as bills for me is gas& electricity, water, council tax, broadband, and TV licence.

1 Like
11

Yesterday we published a guide to 11 different budgeting categories that’ll help you manage your money :moneybag:

Read it here: https://bit.ly/2Tez4Ss

Are there any other budgeting categories you think should be included in this list? :raised_hands:

1 Like
12

I also prefer housing rather than bills. Bills is something you can aim to reduce or avoid (not paying for internet and tethering) but housing is something most people will need in their budget and will likely be unchanged.

The only thing in my housing budget is actual housing cost and insurance. I toyed with having insurance as a category but not for home insurance.

The rest (water, energy etc…) is all in bills.

2 Likes
13

I added in a separate category for car park and one for clothes on mine as one is dependent on what days I go into the office, and the other I tend to not buy for several months then go buy lots at once

1 Like
14

I have a custom category for clothes, but I actually just end up using the Shopping category.

Do you set a budget against your car park and clothes categories, or do you use it more ad-hoc?

15

I set a budget for car park, but the clothes one is more ad hoc as I don’t regularly buy any for ages, then buys lots at once