I am changing my budget categories a little to make my budgeting process a little easier. When I started budgeting my categories were very detailed and accounted for a lot of different areas. I whittled that down a little over the years, and once again I am changing it up.

I decided to change two of my budget categories and combine them into one big category. I used to separate food from non-food purchases in the store as well as in Mint. I would actually place a divider between food and non-food and would pay for them separately.

I recently began to just get a subtotal for each category and just make one payment. I would then use the subtotal amount to account for the payment in Mint.

This year I decided to combine the two categories and just classify them as ‘Shopping’. Part of this decision was that Mint tends to classify my purchases from Wally World as shopping in any case and I would always have to look at the receipts to reclassify the food as ‘food’.

By combining the two I save myself the hassle of going back and changing things each time. I also save more time in general because I have been really good with my budget and do not need that much detail in my record keeping.

I am happy that I am making this change to the budget categories and I hope I can stick with it for the full year. I don’t know if I will decide to go back to separating them next year but so far I feel good about the change.