How do you budget for "random things"? Like, we bought new pacifiers, a gift for a teacher, and swim supplies for summer camp. None of those really fit into any of my major categories, and creating a category that they would fit isn't really what I want since I don't plan to regularly purchase pacifiers (or most baby supplies that don't fall into the groceries category). Does it make sense to have an "uncategorized" category and just give it a rough $XX which may or may not be used?

We budget for gifts/ appreciation. But the little things have an ‘odds and ends’ budget category monthly.

How do you account for the inherent volatility of such a category?

kinda new to the game, but what i'm trying (inspired by a service call riseup) is that your budget includes fixed expenses, expenses that you know will happen, but are variable, but you can estimate them, either by looking at last month, or averaging, etc. once you're done with that, you can subtract from your projected income, and everything else goes into a miscellaneous spending category, that doesn't specifically need to be budgeted (unless it belongs in category 2) from that you can figure out how much you save, how much you can spend, or how much you can cry specifically, for something like pacifiers I would either just categorize as food, or pharm depending on where I bought it...not sure it's worth the effort to get that granular

I have a category of random stuff around $100 a month for that. We call it the Shalom Bais Fund 🙂

same here with a Misc category. There is volatility, but in both directions, so if you allocate a set amount and use a rollover, it will even out

I think after a while these random categories can have actual categories. New pacifiers = baby stuff or kid stuff Swim supplies = kid stuff or summer camp Gift for teacher = Maaser or gifts for others You will always have these types of purchases so might as well start saving for them. If you categories are: Groceries Gas Bills Then yeah they won’t fit. But get more granular and you can make categories that fit your spending habits.

if my goal is to make sure that income > expenses, and having something left over to save does it matter what's in that misc category there's also the effort involved. do I have to now granually go through my grocery shopping receipt to figure out that I spent $2 on "kids" and $98 on "food"? or do I just say, I have a $2000 food budget, and I assume that includes things that i'd buy at grocery stores

That’s up to you. I like splitting it up but some people put plastic ware in the same category as groceries which would drive me bananas

@rapid-account-67960 It makes it easier for me to plan the budget ahead and be conscientious about where we are spending if we plan the categories. I generally categorize by stores (had I bought the pacifiers at the grocery store, they'd probably have just ended up in groceries...). But I try to go through our Amazon purchases and categorize them, otherwise it gets out of control quickly.