Finally split my accounts the way folks here suggested, bills in one, extra in another (the one meant for stuff like this), and it held for 3 weeks. Then the car needed brakes before my 90-minute commute, and that bill was $340, more than the whole extra category for the month.
First, do you size that category off a bad month or an average one? Second, does a repair get its own bucket, or does it just live with medical and home stuff in one fund?
Averaging it out undersells what actually happens, repairs don’t average out, they just show up all at once and wreck whatever number you picked for the month. I started keeping the repair fund totally separate from medical and home stuff after my water heater died on me, that one was $610 out of nowhere and it ate the whole extra category for 2 months straight before I caught back up.
Averaging it out is what trips people up here, I think it’s less about bad month vs average and more about sizing the category for the worst month you’ve actually had, not the typical one. My car is still new to me since I just started driving lessons, so I don’t have a repair history to go by yet, but at my retail job a slow week last month left me about $220 under what I usually bring home, and
QuietAcre, that’s where it gets tricky for me too, because my worst month so far got beaten by an even worse one back in March, I’d set the repair bucket off an old number from a couple years back and then the water heater went and topped it at $410, so the ceiling I thought was fixed moved again right when I thought I’d finally gotten it dialed in.
same here, kept it separate, ours runs $150.
Mine’s separate from medical, sized high since repairs never land in a slow month.
Average for routine stuff, worst case for the repair bucket, kind of need both honestly
only 2 months in, how do you size yours?
slowsundays, honestly 2 months isn’t enough to size off average or worst case yet, so I’d just pad it high for now and adjust once you’ve had a slow month and a bad one back to back. My mistake was basing mine on an old number from years back, so until you’ve got your own repair hit to calibrate against, lean toward overestimating rather than under.
mine was $280, kept separate from medical too
ours got hit by a repair too, rough month 😕
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