Problem
Every year I have large irregular spendings like car maintenance, holidays, kids school trips or one-off emergencies. Having a monthly budget for those does not work because one most of the year it’s zero and then one month it’s like £1000+ sometimes.
Right now to avoid spoiling the rest of my normal monthly budget I mark those spendings as “excluded from summary”, so it’s not reflected in the monthly budget. But then it’s not reflected anywhere and effectively not accounted for.
Solution
Having some kind of longer term budget would probably help. E.g. yearly budget with allowances for holidays and other categories, and that will account for spending that were “excluded” and show overall progress yearly progress.