20 MIND-BLOWING Spending Categories For Your Spending Tracker or Budget

So you finally worked up the courage to start monitoring your spending, and you’re faced with the grueling task of curating your own categories list. This will be one of the most important decisions you make in your financial life—or perhaps your lifetime—so it’s crucial to get it right.

Luckily, we’ve broken it down for you and come up with the 20 BEST spending categories that any spending tracker MUST feature. Here they are (in alphabetical order):

Auto
Beauty/Hygiene
Charity
Childcare
Clothing
Education
Entertainment
Food
Gas
Gift
Health/Dental
Home
Household
Miscellaneous
Phone
Special Event
Taxes
Transportation
Utilities
Vacation

1. Auto

Drive a car? Then this one’s ESSENTIAL for your spending tracker/budget. Auto expenses refer to any purchases or services directly related to your vehicle(s). They do NOT include gas or tolls, which should be separated from your other auto spending for more transparent tracking (don’t you want to know how much you spent on gas last month?). Here’s a sampling of expenses that belong in your Auto category:

Auto Insurance
Car Parts/Accessories
Car Repairs
Vehicle Maintenance (e.g., car washes)
Vehicle Registration Fees

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2. Beauty/Hygiene

Number 2 is ‘Beauty/Hygiene.’ This overlooked spending category includes expenses aimed at enhancing your attractiveness or palatability to other humans. It encompasses a variety of expenses that don’t easily fit into the traditional categories. Here are some classic examples:

Haircuts
Makeup/Skincare Products
Manis/Pedis
Shampoo/Conditioner
Soap/Body Wash

3. Charity

The next category is for all you “do-gooders” out there. If you pay tithing to your religious congregation, you probably want to break that out as a separate ‘Tithing’ category. Here are some examples of charitable institutions you might support:

American Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
Doctors Without Degrees
Salvation Army
The Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good

4. Childcare

This one’s essential for those entrusted with the supervision and nurturing of little humans. Here are some common forms of childcare that you may pay for:

Babysitting
Daycare
Relatives being in the same house as your child while you’re at work

5. Clothing

This one may seem optional, but there are some who argue it’s actually not desirable to continue wearing your high school wardrobe more than 10 years after graduating. If you subscribe to the latter way of thinking, you may find it necessary to regularly purchase items such as the following:

Accessories/Accoutrements (e.g., belts, hats, handbags, jewelry, watches)
Pants/Shorts
Shirts
Socks/Shoes
Undergarments

6. Education

Do you like grifts? Do you enjoy spending vast amounts of time and money on pieces of paper that serve no purpose other than to signal that you can reliably wake up in the morning? Then this category probably applies to you. Here’s a sampling of typical education expenses:

College/Graduate School/Preschool Tuition
Private School
Self-study
Student Loans
Tutoring

7. Entertainment

If you’re Cyndi Lauper, you might think this is all girls want to do; but here at Excel At Money, we believe that some boys also just wanna have fun. So in the spirit of inclusivity, here are some expenses that should be a part of anybody’s balanced budget:

Concerts/Live Events
Fun Books
Gaming
Movie Tickets
Streaming Services

8. Food

Whether you’re a foodie who lives to eat or an ascetic who eats to live, we all need to eat copious amounts of fast food. Here are some other vehicles for gorging ourselves:

Convenience Stores
Grocery Stores
Restaurants
Coffee Shops
Yummy Drink Places

9. Gas(oline)

This may seem like an auto expense, but if you bundle your gas spending with other car-related costs, you won’t be able to monitor your success in turning your gas-guzzler into an electric vehicle by taking your foot off the gas pedal on downhill slopes and using friction and air resistance to brake rather than the car’s built-in braking system. Of course, disregard this if you own a real electric vehicle; in that case, you can substitute this category with ‘Electric Charging’.

10. Gift

Okay, finally a category that might actually merit some explanation. I define gifts as purchases made on behalf of people outside of your household (i.e., outside of your spouse and children). I apply a different category for gifts intended for household members (see ‘Special Event’ below). Gifts you receive from non-household members also get the ‘Gift’ tag, but with the opposite sign on the amount. The point of all this is to distinguish between money spent on your immediate family and money spent outside of it. Some examples:

Birthday Presents for Non-Household Members
Christmas Presents for Non-Household Members
Retirement Gifts for Colleagues You Hate
Wedding Gifts for Your Spouse’s Friends You’ve Never Met

11. Health/Dental

This can be a pretty wide-ranging category. You may want to split up ‘Health’ and ‘Dental’ if your dental expenses are significant (i.e., your mouth is a money pit); or you could distinguish between ‘Medical/Dental’ and ‘Personal Wellness’ if you’re one of those people obsessed with living past 100. I wouldn’t fractionate things too much, though. Your goal is to find the right balance of granularity and practicality, ensuring you have enough detail to make informed decisions without getting bogged down in minutiae.

Dental Appointments/Procedures
Dental Supplies (e.g., floss, toothpaste)
Gym Membership
Medical Appointments/Procedures
Medication/Supplements

12. Home

You can call this whatever you want: ‘Housing’, ‘Rent’, ‘Mortgage’, or if you’re a funny guy—‘The Bank’s House I Just Sleep In’. This category encompasses the major costs associated with keeping a roof over your head. You could include secondary costs like home repairs and maintenance, but I prefer to lump those in with ‘Household’ costs.

Mortgage/Rent
HOA Dues
Home Insurance

13. Household

Essentially, this refers to the catalog of items at HomeGoods. Or IKEA. Or Bed Bath & Beyond (when it was still alive). As mentioned above, I’d also include home repairs in this.

Cleaning Supplies
Kitchen Supplies
Furniture
Home Repairs
Household Appliances

14. Miscellaneous

Trust me, you need a category for ‘None of the above’. You may think you’ve come up with a set of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive spending categories, but when you find yourself purchasing a life-size cardboard cutout of Johnny Depp for an elaborate office prank, you’ll realize you need a catch-all category.

15. Phone

Did you know that Christopher Nolan doesn’t own a smartphone? But you do.

Phone Plan
Phone Accessories (e.g., PopSocket cases, ring holder cases, kickstand cases, card holder cases)

16. Special Event

This is another Excel At Money innovation. It encompasses all spending on your family’s (your household’s) special occasions throughout the year, including gifts, dinners, and decorations. The rationale behind it is to enable you to monitor how much you spend on recurring events within your household. Presumably, most of your ‘Special Event’ spending each month corresponds with a particular occasion, so filtering on ‘Special Event’ and November/December, for example, should surface all of your Christmas-related spending (on your family) each year.

Here are some generic types of events you might spend on:

Anniversaries
Birthdays
Cultural/Religious Holidays
“Happy” Holidays (e.g., Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa)

17. Taxes

I know, I know. It’s one of the two things you can’t escape in life. But take consolation in knowing that your tax dollars are only used to address legitimate public needs, that the costs and benefits of each program are rigorously analyzed, and that objective metrics are applied to measure the effectiveness of each dollar spent in achieving its stated purpose. If it weren’t for that knowledge, I think we’d all be a LOT more annoyed come tax season.

From a categorization perspective, the only nuance here is that you may want to differentiate property taxes from other taxes. To better gauge the cost of vehicle ownership, for example, you might file your vehicle property tax under ‘Auto’, not ‘Taxes’.

18. Transportation

I generally define this category as any cost directly associated with getting you from point A to point B, excluding gas (see above) and vacation-related travel (see below). This definition would include airfare for non-recreational purposes, like attending a funeral. If ‘Transportation’ seems like an odd tag for a funeral-related expense, you might consider referring to this as ‘Transportation/Travel’. Here are some representative examples:

Parking
Public Transit
Rideshare/Taxi Services
Tolls

19. Utilities

This is a fun one. No, really. Have you ever tried to gamify the reduction of your utilities bill? Get a Nest thermometer, replace all your lights with energy-efficient bulbs, institute a policy of turning off the lights whenever engaged in an activity where visibility isn’t important (like sitting on the toilet). Then watch each month as you shave literally $6 off your electricity/gas bills.

You can include cable and Internet in this category, or you can break it out if you want to monitor your energy-reduction efforts more precisely.

Cable/Internet (optional)
Electricity
Gas
Water

20. Vacation

Do you go on vacation, then feel so miserable upon your return to work that the stress of returning effectively neutralizes any relaxation achieved by taking time off? If so, you might consider omitting this item from your budget; otherwise, this is a pretty useful category to measure how much money you’re pouring into vacations every year.

Below is the scope of what I include as ‘Vacation’ costs. I generally exclude meals and souvenirs/gifts, which in my view are somewhat extraneous to the vacation.

Lodging
Entertainment (e.g., shows, parks, tours)
Transportation (e.g., airfare, car rental, public transit, Uber/Lyft)

Well, there you have it! The 20 BEST spending categories to include in your spending tracker. I hope this “listicle” wasn’t as painful to read as it was to write. Hopefully, you clicked on the Excel At Money Spending Tracker at some point while reading it, otherwise the whole post was in vain.

Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to your spending categories. You’ll have to come up with an assortment of categories tailored to your unique situation and spending habits. Did I mention that the Excel At Money Spending Tracker empowers you to create a custom categories list uniquely suited for your personal spending habits?

So what did you think about my list? Do you agree that ‘Gas’ should be considered separate from ‘Transportation’? Let us know in the comments below!!

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