NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
The “Commingled Purchase” Problem That Budget Apps Don’t Warn You About
02 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey Elizabeth, what is your biggest hurdle when it comes to tracking your expenses?
I don't want to blame it on my ADHD, but my ADHD.
You know, I'm right there with you. But fortunately, there are lots of budgeting apps that try to make this easy for you, although sometimes it's a little bit more difficult when the rubber actually hits the road with these apps. Welcome to NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast, where you send us your money questions and we answer them with the help of our genius nerds. I'm Sean Piles.
And I'm Elizabeth Ayola. This episode, we're going to be exploring how to actually make budgeting apps track your expenses. And here's our listener's question, which comes from a text message. Hey, nerds. Tools such as Monarch, YNAB, et cetera, are great for creating a budget. However, for years, I've struggled to actually track expenses against that budget.
A big reason for this is many of my family's expenses come from big box stores like Costco, Target, Walmart, Amazon, etc. that consistently involve commingling purchases of groceries, clothing, toys, and other budget categories. Any suggestions on how to accurately split these changes to get an accurate picture of spending?
The only way I have discovered around this is to log itemized receipts by hand, which becomes extremely cumbersome and often leads to abandoning the budget. Thanks.
I can relate to any administrative hurdle leaving me to quickly abandon my budgeting. So I'm right there with you, listener. So to help us answer this listener's question, we are joined by personal finance nerd Amanda Barroso. Hey, Amanda, welcome back to Smart Money.
Hey, y'all, listen, I just went to Target the other day and my receipt was exactly what this listener is talking about. It was like bluey rain boots, baby wash, some hummus. I mean, like it had it all.
What, those aren't all needs? What do you mean? The bluey rain boots are really important.
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Chapter 2: How can budgeting apps handle commingled purchases?
No. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? I did. I did. My algorithm is full of random crap from Costco and people buying them. So with this jar of peaches, the whole gimmick was that there was one woman in one video who spent maybe five minutes trying to get the peach out of the jar because she It just wasn't designed to actually get the peaches out, I guess.
And then when you eat it, it's a whole entire peach with the pit in it. So eating it is a mess, but I still did it for the novelty of it. And to me in the moment that felt like a need because I love peaches. But in retrospect, that was probably more of a want. I would have categorized that a little bit differently. That's all to say, it's hard to sort these things out in the moment.
So Amanda, what do you think is maybe a good place to start when categorizing these different purchases when using budgeting apps? I mean, I would hope that some apps... that have a functionality where you could split purchases in one purchase into different categories? I mean, I imagine it depends on the app that you're using.
Absolutely. So I reached out to folks at Monarch, the folks at YNAB and EveryDollar, and I asked them directly, just like, hey, how do your apps address this issue? I spoke with the head of product marketing at Monarch. She explained two features that could potentially solve this problem for our listener, I think. So the first is this new receipt scanning feature in the app.
So you snap a photo of like your Costco receipt. Monarch automatically attaches it to the right transaction, right? And adds details about what you actually bought. So I think it kind of sounds like it does exactly what our listener was hoping it would do. It splits one big charge into multiple properly categorized transactions.
How does the app know if those peaches are my need or my want?
Well, it might not categorize it into wants and needs, but it might say peaches belong in groceries, which are needs, right? The point being that it takes us like just one big mystery $250 Costco purchase and breaks it down into groceries, household items, electronics. The goal here is like just to give you a much clearer picture of your spending.
They have a second feature, which I think is worth noting. It's called a retail sync Chrome browser extension. So with most of these budgeting apps, not all, but most, you can access them on your desktop or on your phone. So this would be one that you would download a Chrome extension for when you're operating and you're working on your budget on your desktop.
So this lets users connect their Monarch account to their Amazon and Target account. So right now it's just those two stores. So from there, Monarch pulls in orders, your purchase details, itemizes those details, and then recategorizes them accordingly so that your budget and all the reports that you're pulling or whatever reflect the categories you've actually spent on.
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Chapter 3: What features do popular budgeting apps offer for categorizing expenses?
You have to know where every dollar is going because there aren't that many of them. And then as people's incomes grow or maybe their expenses lower, sometimes it can be really easy to just not budget at all.
And the reality is that a lot of people, and this is kind of a secret of the financial planning world, is that most people don't really have a great grip on their monthly expenses and how much they're spending on a regular basis. That can be okay as long as you have the infrastructure in the background to make sure that you are saving regularly, you're paying off your debt, yada, yada, yada.
If you get to a comfortable enough place of having your finances sorted, I actually don't know if you need to track every single penny. That's why I don't do that. But you still need to be responsible enough and understand how much you're spending on things on a regular basis. So there's a balancing act for sure.
But I don't think that you need to be strict and punishing yourself and spending hours and hours budgeting if you have your finances mostly sorted out. Maybe that's just me justifying my own behavior, though.
Yeah, I think it's about having that good financial foundation or framework for managing your money. And once you get in a good rhythm with that, and also obviously depending on your income and expenses, you can get to a place where you don't have to track every penny. Unless you love doing that, of course.
Right. OK, so I have three ideas for people who don't want to track every penny, but kind of empathize with the listener of like, OK, maybe I have a family. Maybe I do a lot of my shopping at Costco, Amazon, Target, Walmart, where your cart is just a hodgepodge of things.
If your goal is tracking your spending behavior, not your receipts to the penny like you're talking about, you could consider a merchant based budget. where you designate like $200 at Costco every month, $150 at Target, whatever it is. You could go back, look at the last six months of your spending at these types of stores and come up with an average or something like that.
Or if you're trying to lower it, you could challenge yourself a little bit and come in a little bit lower. But consider the stores that you shop at the most and kind of give yourself a budget for those stores. I'll admit this is kind of what my family does. So if you're trying to avoid tracking fatigue, which I think our listener is, try picking a default category for each store.
So like Costco could be groceries. Target is household stuff. Amazon is miscellaneous or it's shopping. You know, in all of these budgeting apps, there's some of those little categories that are like Other, you could set a rule for yourself within this. Okay, I'm only going to itemize receipts if they're over $100. Anything else, it's 25 bucks, whatever, right?
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