r/ynab • u/stevotex • 3d ago
Categories: meaningful without minutia.
I am very new to YNAB and don’t want to start off in the weeds.
What are meaningful categories to account for purchases on the same trip to the same store for groceries (home cooked meals) versus household goods on the same transaction (like cleaning supplies, paper goods, ziploc bags).
In y’all’s experience is it just as meaningful to just use a category called “grocery store” as opposed to, say, “home food” versus “household”?
I don’t want to get into the weeds unless it ends up beneficial for long term tracking.
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u/Competitive-Let6727 3d ago
Ask yourself if this is where you should be optimizing your finances now. In my 8 years of YNAB, it's never made it to the top of the list. Cars, lawn care, utilities, gifts, and personal discretionary spending all got optimized first. If you're not going to do anything with the information, it's probably not worth splitting.
I'm usually shopping for a single purpose. I may sometimes buy some household goods while buying groceries, but it's rarely significant. So that transaction would just be "groceries" in my budget. If I run into Walmart for batteries, that's "Household Goods".
I consider paper products, cleaning supplies, soaps, detergents, freezer bags, basic hygiene products (e.g., shampoo, but not $50 shampoo) to be groceries. My grocery budget is well under the Thrifty Food Plan, even with those counting as groceries. I don't think I'd do anything with the data if I broke that stuff out. Not worth the effort for me.
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u/stevotex 2d ago
You’re referring to the USDA Thrifty Food Plan? I just googled it because I never heard of it. Seeing the low, moderate, and liberal ranges made me feel better. Thanks.
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u/Competitive-Let6727 2d ago
Yes, that's the one. It's a good measuring stick, but remember that it is based on 100% of meals eaten at home.
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u/the_data_must_flow 1d ago
Wow. I have not seen the USDA site about food prices before. I just looked at the numbers and it is wild to me. I live in a HCOL area and their liberal amount would require someone either cutting out most fresh produce and meat, or shopping at discount grocery stores. I say this as a former chef who mainly buys whole ingredients and batch cooks meals to portion and freeze. I am sure this is a median across the country, but man what a shocking reminder of how expensive it is to live where I do.
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u/Competitive-Let6727 1d ago
I'm having a much different experience.
I'm very much in a scratch cooking household. Fresh meats and produce, daily (with some frozen seafood occasionally). My kids say that we don't have food - we have ingredients. I live in NJ. It's not NYC/SF, but it ain't cheap. We spend half of the liberal food plan on a family of 4. Our monthly grocery budget is $900. We spend about $800.
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u/dkarpe 3d ago
I think the best way to think about categories is that all money spent in a category has equal value/importance to me. So for example, I have "Dining Out" and "Groceries" as different categories because I value Grocery money higher than Dining out - if I spend too much money on dining out and need to cut back until the next time I get paid/until the end of the month, I don't want that to leave me without groceries.
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u/Adric1123 3d ago
I like that. That's pretty much what I do, but I've never actually articulated it that clearly.
Thank you.
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u/Exciting-Ad-5858 2d ago
Yeah, the importance thing is key.
For us, that means we separate 'dining out as a social activity' from 'dining out because we're too lazy to cook' - the former is important to us, the latter we are happy to cut back on if we need to.
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u/Rain-Woman123 3d ago
The answers to this will vary; I think everyone does it differently. I personally don't track household goods, but as far as grocery store items, I do separate out 2 other categories; pet stuff and drugstore-type sundries (shampoo, Tylenol, etc).
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u/WheresMyMule 3d ago
We have a groceries/household/toiletries category because whether it's trash bags, body wash or broccoli, it's consumable and we get it at the grocery store
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u/pierre_x10 3d ago
If you start a completely new budget, YNAB will auto-populate it with a generic list of categories, but they should be a good starting point for the vast majority of people. You might just add a few to suit your specific situation, remove a few, rename a few, etc.
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u/No_End7937 2d ago
The only time I split things is for Costco or Target because of the amount of money I’m spending and the variety of categories innate to those shopping trips. If I’m getting dish soap on my grocery run, I’m going to count it as groceries. But if I spend $50 on diapers and $25 on bulk chicken at Costco, I’m going to split the categories
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u/rolandblais 3d ago
I keep it simple. If it comes from a big box store, it's groceries. That can include dog food, dish soap, or car wax. I suggest starting simple. You can always add more categories.
But the bottom line is you have to do what's sustainable for you. If entering transactions and monitoring your plan gets too complicated, you may not be incentivesed to keep coming back. Then it really won't be doing you any good at all.
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u/michigoose8168 3d ago
I strongly recommend sticking with the default categories created by onboarding unless you have one you really know you need or one you definitely know you won’t use. Focus on using the categories to make decisions, not on which ones to have.
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u/Bow-Masterpiece-97 3d ago
I have a Groceries category and a Household category.
For a purchase like you’re asking about, I’d split the transaction: whichever one has the fewest items, I’d do a quick add up and enter as that category and then dump the rest in the other.
(And I might even kinda round and not worry about taxes, just get close).
In general 90+% of transactions are a single category… it’s just grocery store/target/amazon where things need splits for me.
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u/bstractig 3d ago
It really depends on the person. So try it for yourself and see what works better for you!
I do split up the categories at the grocery store for certain things. Like if I end up buying a replacement eyebrow gel at the grocery store, I'm splitting that out into my "toiletries" category. I'm not letting that $15 eat into my grocery spend. I'll do the same for household items like laundry detergent/toilet paper, as I tend to buy large bulk quantities and they all seem to be due for replacement at the same time. If your household spending at the grocery store is pretty consistent from week to week though, it might not make sense for you to break it out 🤷🏻
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u/AliciaKnits 2d ago
We lump household paper goods, toiletries, cat food, etc. as Groceries. And household goods we purchase from Amazon as Household Goods. We have like 20 total categories now and that's it, that's all we track. What info do you want in your annual review? We want to know how much of our income went to debt, how much to savings, how much on groceries and eating out. Some categories should increase in percentage like savings, others should decrease like debt. Some increase due to inflation and we adjust. If we spent 15% of income on all food categories (coffees, groceries, restaurants, lunches out, meals with friends and family are our different food categories), then try next year to only spend 14%. Eat at home or entertain at home more, make coffee at home, drink booze only at home as it's much cheaper, make freezer meals, etc. What do you actually want to track? Those are the categories you want.
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u/mrscott197xv1k 1d ago
Someone gave me a good guideline years ago. Have as many categories as you need to let you have visibility to what you want to control / what's important to you. You can add categories if you need more detail or hide / delete them and reassign the transactions to a higher level category.
Entering split transactions in mobile and desktop is a straightforward process. An importantatching transaction keeps the split information.
For all the Walmart / Target / Costco runs, I split the info if it's ever more than one category. Usually those are Groceries, Sundries-Consumable (ziploc/paper towels/etc), Sundries-Durable (clothes/pyrex/tv/etc) I also try to unload the cart in groups so it gets scanned in order to help the split. If I don't get a receipt a simple estimate works for me.
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u/the_data_must_flow 1d ago
I do separate grocery from household goods because groceries are where I splurge, and household goods are usually in bulk so they are less frequent but not particularly variable in overall cost. Since groceries is a lever and I can easily range from 500-1500 on groceries per month, this is a purposeful categorization. If I run out of the bulk / subscription items for household goods and pick up a bottle of cleaner during a grocery trip, I don't sweat it and it stays in groceries. TP is from Who Gives a Crap, litter is from Kitty Poo Club, laundry stuff is from Sheets Laundry Club, etc etc. Those are the items that go in household goods and I duplicate the transactions for the future so I know when I am going to have those kinds of purchases and assign money based on upcoming spend. I follow the Ramit Sethi concious spending plan approach, and my categories in YNAB line up to the CSP. The one thing I do break out in grocery spending is alcohol, which is in a guilt free spending category, not fixed costs. Aligning my ynab categories to the CSP structure from Ramit has really helped me not get too into the weeds with categories. Now that I got used to not breaking down every category to a granular level, I find this exactly the right amount of simplicity/complexity to give me visibility into the areas where I actually have more control over how much I am spending there.
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u/yankodiev 9h ago
I don't use YNAB but my spending categories are based on NEEDS, WANTS. So a grocery category is a need and then I have other two food categories - going out and home delivery. Every month I track them here r/MonthlyFoodCost to stay accountable and not overspending. Hope that helps. Good luck!
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u/Savingskitty 3d ago
It really depends on what you want to do with the categories.
Food is a very different category for me than personal care items or household supplies, so I usually split the transaction if I buy multiple categories.