[Alexis]

Shopping at big-box retailers like Walmart and Target often involves buying a wide variety of items in a single trip, from groceries and home essentials to electronics and personal care products.

For those who track their expenses closely, how do you break down or categorize these purchases when budgeting?

Do you split them into different categories like “groceries,” “household items,” and “personal care,” or do you handle them in another way?

I’m curious to know if there are any tools, apps, or strategies you find helpful for organizing these mixed-category purchases and keeping track of where your money is going.

[Dawn]

Depends on what I buy. Food, clothing, halloween stuff

[Aaron]

Split the transaction based on what’s purchased. Groceries, home stuff, general shopping. Depends on what categories you track.

[Monica]

Most of my purchases from those stores fall under grocery for us – I include normal grocery, paper products, and toiletries in our grocery category.

[Angela]

Use YNAB and split it up as you need. If you have the Walmart app, it will have all receipts on there with a pic of the item so it’s easy to see if it’s groceries or something else.

[Sallie]

I categorize groceries and then most everything else as “shopping” (Amazon, Walmart, Target) unless it’s for a specific purpose or project.

I think it evens out because some of my Walmart purchases are groceries and some of my groceries are toiletries/home supplies/etc.

I would make a decision, stick to it, and watch for trends.

[Kara]

I hate allocating, so for my convenience and to keep things simple, all Walmart receipts go to “groceries” since I include household supplies and toiletries in that category.

(Except for Walmart pharmacy receipts which go to healthcare.)

All Amazon and Target receipts go to “shopping” which is a discretionary category and I do certainly buy groceries and consumable goods from those stores, but my shopping at those places is more discretionary (clothes, decorative items, etc).

The toughest store for me to allocate is Costco.

Lots of groceries but also random sporting goods and electronics.

[Jamie]

one of the best things we did was stop gnat-ass’ing all the purchases from target and costco and have more vague categories in our budget.

we used to split the transaction between a dozen line items it seemed!

[Sue]

I’m pretty OCD. LOL. I split the bill into categories: food, pet, clothing, misc, personal care, home maintenance, etc.

I have a budget category for all those and an amount set for each one.

I keep track of every penny I spend for each category on a spreadsheet and average it every month to make sure I’m allowing enough or need to cut back.

[Carrie]

I split everything out based on what was bought and its cost.
Usually:
Groceries
Shopping
Gifts
Personal Care
Clothing

[Krisa]

When I do our business bookkeeping, I always breakdown the expenses and code accordingly.

But if you don’t want to do this, just do separate transactions in the self checkout line.

[Golden]

What do you mean? We don’t categorize anything. It just goes on the credit like everything else.

Pay off credit card at end of the month.

[Jess]

I feel this question lol I try my hardest to get my wife to split purchases –

most of the time it works on the rare occasion she forgets she does at least save the receipt – it’s a headache if you think of something better let me know!

[Ryan]

Keep a mental note of rough category percentages, split accordingly and tell myself it’ll be OK, nothing bad happens if it’s off a little bit

[Farish]

Are you budgeting after the fact when the purchases are made? Because that isn’t budgeting, that is just expense tracking.

Looking into a zero budgeting system like YNAB, after two or three months, you will start having an idea of what your average monthly spend is in certain categories.

[Ashley]

“Incidentals” if it’s not groceries. For our family clothing generally falls under that too if it’s not a big shopping trip.

Our needs changed with the seasons so it didn’t really provide value.

We got an overall sense of how our money flowed though when we’d reconcile at the end of the month.

[Moore]

I have not figured out a good way to categorize them yet. In addition to our family grocery and household purchases and we also purchase items for our volunteer work that can be reimbursed.

I used to separate everything in the basket and make separate purchases at the register.

But that still didn’t help especially, if I lost the receipt.

I hope someone has better ideas.

[Christy]

My budget has an Amazon line item, that my line item for all the crap I buy but don’t need

[Ashley]

I feel like if you need to be on a budget you can break there down but that’s not very necessary to financial principles.

Am I outside of my budget? Do I wish to be putting more into retirement? Okay, then what area can I Reduce?

No extras at Walmart.

etc. don’t get hung up on the wrong end of the problem

[Author]

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