You Can’t Budget Without These Budget Categories

Budgeting takes a lot of trial and error to really get into your groove. Don’t be discouraged if you recently began budgeting and have felt defeated when you have fallen off track. 

Many times, you can be missing several critical budgeting categories in your monthly budget, which causes you to overspend or continuously be over budget. 

These are the five budget categories you may be missing from your monthly budget:

1.    Minimum Debt Payments: Your minimum debt payments should be considered as a fixed monthly expense in your budget. While you are tackling your debt, you should always pay at least the minimum amount required each month. Therefore, your total minimum payments should always be included.  

2.    Monthly Subscriptions: Anything that is a recurring monthly or annual subscription should be accounted for in your monthly budget. Don’t forget things like Apple Music, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Netflix and more. Forgetting to budget for these expenses can derail your budget, if you have a lot of monthly subscriptions. This may also be a great time to review those subscriptions and remove any unused ones! 

3.    Entertainment: Do you typically find yourself going out to the movies? Hanging out at Happy Hours? Visiting theme parks? These experiences can be considered and accounted for in your entertainment budget line item for guilt free spending!

4.    Shopping: This is a category that can vary for many individuals and possibly even be split out in subcategories such as Clothing, Beauty, Personal Spending and more. You can consider implementing this category each month to help you assess your spending as you begin tracking against your budgeted amounts.

5.    Restaurants: Enjoy dining experiences? You should absolutely consider creating and implementing a Restaurant budget. This can cover things like take out, brunches, dinners and more.

This is you reminder that your budget is not complete without reviewing and adding in these types of categories!