Does anyone have any tips for budgeting for periodic expenses, i.e. ones that don't happen regularly/every month?
My wife and I are trying to travel for some yearly travel, whether vacations or holiday travel, but we don't spend a certain amount every month. The same goes for planned auto repairs, clothing, and some other miscellaneous expenses.
It ends up throwing off our monthly overall budget (we'll be way over on the months we spend in these categories) and harder to plan for.
Budgeting for periodic/occasional expenses Oct 31, 2009 06:02 pm
This post is about: Quicken Online
One way to save for future expenses is to set up a "Club Account" at your bank - a Christmas club account or a Vacation Club account, etc. Then, each pay period, put a certain amount into it for your future expenses. If you don't see it, you're less likely to spend it. Note: If you have direct-deposit, your bank may let you allocate money automatically from your paycheck into your club accounts.
Things get a bit tricky, though, when a person has more items to budget for than their bank has club accounts. Then you have to start putting money into the the same account for multiple items.
For instance, you may open Club Account #1 and put a calculated amount of money into it each paycheck for quarterly auto insurance, annual local taxes (PA has lots of those!), clothing purchases, and so on. Then after a year or two of depositing every pay-period and withdrawing when those expenses hit, it's easy to lose track of just what portion of that money was allocated for which expenses.
I haven't found an easy way to keep track of that yet, short of keeping a running spreadsheet, which would be tedious and error-prone. If anyone has an easy technique for keeping track, I'd be interested in hearing it, too.
I think the real answer is for Quicken Online to come up with a way to track those "sub-balances" (for lack of a better word). The lessons-learned from the current financial crisis seems to be that we need to move from a credit-based economy to a savings-based economy. If Quicken can help us track our budgeted-savings it would help a lot of folks out.
Sorry for the long post. I hope the first part helps you with your savings goals. And, I hope the second part reaches the ears of Quicken developers. :-)
Thanks ChestnutGrove; that is very helpful! I will set something like that up. Keeping track of the different categories will be a bit trickier, but I'm also not terribly worried about that for the moment; travel is the big one, and I think I'll just start there to see where we end up.
And yes, Quicken developers, there's plenty of opportunity here. ;)
