nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

View Unusual and Optional Spending

Kseniya · 2026-07-27T13:57:10+00:00

I'm looking for a way to easily view two things: * Unusual spending - why is this month more costly than the last or than the average across months. For example, a yearly insurance bill that plus a costly car repair that hit in a particular month. * Optional spending - The ability to designate certain categories as…

Kseniya

I'm looking for a way to easily view two things:

Unusual spending - why is this month more costly than the last or than the average across months. For example, a yearly insurance bill that plus a costly car repair that hit in a particular month.
Optional spending - The ability to designate certain categories as optional spending, rather than mandatory, to make it easier to find where I could have cut back (like dining out and shopping), versus the spending that's just inevitable (like the mortgage and gas for the car and medical). [Right now I do this by adding #optional to the name of the category, but it's hard to filter on that. If this was a separate field, it would be possible to filter more easily, but also break down monthly spending charts by mandatory versus options… and maybe versus unusual spending - from item 1 above.]

Find more posts tagged with

Budgeting

Comments

Coach Natalie

@Kseniya, thanks for posting your suggestions to the Community!

I have converted this to a discussion, as Idea posts must contain only one suggestion per post. Here is our FAQ with more details on how Idea posts work:

https://community.simplifimoney.com/discussion/998/creating-and-voting-for-ideas-in-the-community

With that, I would also suggest adding more detail to each request when you make them individually. For example, are you referring to Planned Spend, Watchlists, or some other area of the program? It sounds like your second request would tie into Planned Spend nicely, but we wouldn't know what specifically you're looking for without those details.

We look forward to seeing your individual requests!

SRC54

Speaking of Optional Spending, I can think of two ways to do that.

You can use watch lists and choose a target, and then work at starting under that target. You could do them individually or just choose your "optional" categories and call the Watchlist "Optional Spending". Of course, you could do that for "Unusual Spending" as well.

As Coach Natalie says, you could also make some Planned Spending Limits for them.

I tend to use recurring bills for big items like insurance; annual service for cars, a/c, etc. Recently I switched to another insurance company, and now I pay my house and car insurance monthly. They don't seem to charge for it as some companies do, and the rates went down.