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
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