NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast - The “Commingled Purchase” Problem That Budget Apps Don’t Warn You About

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

Discover simple rules that can cut budget tracking fatigue and still show you where your money goes. How can you make a budgeting app reflect what you actually bought when one Costco or Target run covers five or 10 different categories? And how can you track those “commingled” purchases without spending your life itemizing receipts? Hosts Sean Pyles and Elizabeth Ayoola talk with personal finance Nerd Amanda Barroso about how to handle mixed transactions so your budget feels usable instead of exhausting. They begin with a discussion of why this problem is so common, features in budgeting apps like Monarch, YNAB, and EveryDollar that make categorizing easier, and how to decide when perfect tracking is the enemy of “good enough.” Then, they discuss practical ways to reduce budgeting fatigue while still learning where your money goes. They discuss how different apps approach splitting transactions, how to think about tradeoffs between accuracy and effort, and how to set simple personal rules that keep you consistent even when shopping gets messy. The Best Budget Apps for 2026: https://www.nerdwallet.com/finance/learn/best-budget-apps  Want us to review your budget? Fill out this form — completely anonymously if you want — and we might feature your budget in a future segment! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScK53yAufsc4v5UpghhVfxtk2MoyooHzlSIRBnRxUPl3hKBig/viewform?usp=header To send the Nerds your money questions, call or text the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373 or email [e-mail]. Like what you hear? Please leave us a review and tell a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Nerd Wallet'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 ask you. 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, Wynab, etc. 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 itemize 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 person. financial 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 was 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. Oh, my gosh. Listen, well, we're flying to New Jersey next week and it's going to be snow on the ground. And this is as close as I can find to snow boots here in Atlanta. So blue rainbows, it is. But this This is, I think, a really common issue. I'm so glad we got this question. Yeah, I mean, this question really gets to some of the practical, really tactical, really tactical issues of using budgeting apps.

How do you sort out your expenses when you have so many, maybe within one single purchase? Because especially when you are going to a Target or you're going to a Costco, you might have different categories in one single spend like our listener described. Like, when I go to Costco, I'm getting myself a really nice reticry chicken for dinner, but then there's always some viral product that I want to get. Like, did you guys see that gigantic jar of peaches? No, sure. Do you guys know what I'm talking about?

No. 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 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 out 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 would 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 every dollar. 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 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. So sometimes what will happen, especially with something like Target or Amazon, those purchases will just get funneled into like a shopping category, this sort of like big amorphous thing. So between those two things, there's a lot of functionality here. Yeah, it sounds really helpful. Well, what did you learn about Wynab, Amanda? I'm glad you asked. So Wynab is another super popular budgeting app. It stands for you need a budget for folks who don't know. So with Wynab, you can split transactions across multiple

categories, but you'll need to do the calculations yourself, which is something that this listener was saying was really a pain point. Yeah. So you'll take your receipt. There's a button you can push that says like split it. And you'll go through each item in your receipt and add it to the categories. Again, like groceries, household, baby and kids, clothing. You kind of get the picture. Wynab app tracks your running total.

And then when you get to the end, you can distribute the remainder. So like sales tax, that kind of thing across all the categories automatically. Yeah, that sounds really crucial for Wynab in particular because of how it functions. This is a zero-based budgeting app, meaning that every single dollar in your budget is accounted for and would be allocated across these different categories of here's my budget for jarred peaches. Here's my budget for bluey boots every month. And depending on your household, you might have different values and different amounts going to these categories. So you really need to have every dollar sorted out. And that's why splitting this receipt is crucial for something like Wynab.

That's totally a key feature that Wynab adapts that budgeting style. Every penny really matters. Yeah, that's why that budgeting app is not for me, I like your general understanding of where my money is going, but not down to the penny. I'm not that anal about it. Same, but I do think budgeting down to the penny is very helpful for people who are like, where is all my paycheck going and who are trying to get their budget together. Okay, so I have one more to mention, and it's every dollar, which is the Dave Ramsey budgeting app. Now, this one also lets you split transactions, but unlike the other two, you're totally in charge of separating those costs. manually into their appropriate categories. And unlike Wynab, there's no running total. I think in the three apps that I looked into,

this one is the most basic and requires the highest level of effort on the part of the user. Okay. So now based on the three apps that you have told us about, thank you for getting all the lowdown on all three of them. Which one would you say makes what the listener is trying to achieve easiest? To me, based on these conversations, Monarch seems to automate more of,

this than any of the other apps. But again, so much of this is personal, and it might take you a few apps, like trying out a few apps, downloading a few free trials to see what feels easier for you, what actually what level of like touch you really want on your money. I will say looking at cost, the good news is Monarch isn't even the most expensive option, so you're getting a lot for your money. Wineab is about $10 more per year. It's like $109 a year, whereas Monarch is about $100. Every dollar cost about $80 a year. So that's kind of where those all stack up in cost. We have a huge roundup and review of budget apps for any listener who wants to dive a little bit deeper into their apps, their functionality, their costs, how they compare. So maybe, Sean, you can throw

those in the show notes or something and that might be helpful. Absolutely. And if I recall correctly, do you use Monarch Amanda in your life with your husband? Yeah. If you pull up the Monarch app review, it's my experience with my husband. And I I honestly think that this was like part of our problem, why I abandoned the ship on it, because it was just like, yeah, I really relate to this listener. So I might like try it again because I feel like these are some pretty cool new features. Uh-huh. Okay.

But you liked it up until the point where you didn't. I remember you saying initially that you kind of liked how it helped you and your husband manage your money together because that's one of the big selling points of Monarch, right? Absolutely. I really do like that feature a lot. And I think we were the problem, like the way that we're things. not our money, was not working. And actually, I'm going to talk about this a little bit later in the episode about how you can start thinking about some of these things, but I think we were the problem.

I would say the app should be able to work for you no matter your budgeting style. Or maybe it's just that app wasn't right for you. Maybe it wasn't right. All right. Well, as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about the importance of categorizing your expenses to begin with. So Amanda, it can be good financial hygiene to categorize your expenses, right? And just know where your needs versus wants are. Yes. Knowing what's a need and what to want is like one of the most fundamental principles of budgeting. You have to really dig down and really look at your life and figure out like what actually do we need to survive and like that does that Netflix subscription cut it? Probably not, right? Some people are going to want though within those categories different

levels of specificity. So itemizing could mean the difference between blowing through your grocery budget or spreading costs out more accurately to reflect your spending. So, you know, take Costco, for example, I might have $125 worth of groceries, but then I might have batteries and light bulbs and toilet paper and those things in my budget might be under household supplies. So if I don't take the time to itemize that, well, dang, I've blown through two weeks of my grocery budget, and that's not actually true. That's not even accurate to my spending. So I think part of this is kind of looking inward and saying, what kind of specificity do I need to make my budget work and to accurately reflect how I'm spending my money every month.

And sometimes what we think is a need when it comes to groceries in particular could be more of a want. Like if you're buying the ultra expensive, fresh handmade pasta from the store down the street, it's probably going to cost you several times more than just getting a box of pasta from the grocery store. And so in that case, you've made a need, which is having some nice pasta for dinner into more of a want by getting the most luxurious option out there. And that's something that I struggle with sometimes is thinking and justifying getting the fancy thing because I just want it and feel like I deserve it, which frankly I do. But that said, you don't want to blow your budget. So it's all about priorities too. I will disagree with you,

Amanda, about Netflix not being a need because how else am I supposed to escape from the chaos happening in the world? So definitely a need for my mental health. Investment in your mental health for sure. It's true. We're humans. We need some place. pleasure in life. We'll be back in a moment after a quick break. Stay with us. Okay, so one thing we've been kind of circling around is the idea of budgeting style, which can be really personal. And it seems like our listener is maybe leaning toward the zero-based budgeting style, which we mentioned earlier. There's a lot of administrative labor involved in zero-based budgeting, which just isn't my thing, even if you're using an app, it's still kind of labor-intensive. But then, on the other

hand, I think a lot of folks might be okay with some kind of ambiguity in their budget. So, Amanda, what are your thoughts on how people can find their own balance of tracking their expenses without there being so much work involved that they just abandoned budgeting entirely? I'm glad you asked me this question because I talk a lot about budgeting at NerdWallet. Like, this is my whole job. And obviously, we never really talk about the work that goes into it. Like, budgeting takes time and intention. It's work, actually, to manage a budget. And we live in a society that tries to make things as frictionless as possible. But maybe understanding our spending requires, like, just more friction.

Maybe having to itemize your receipts, which probably literally takes, how long do you think, five minutes or less? Per receipt. Yeah. It sounds tedious, though. It's the last thing I want to do, I'll be honest. Okay. But having to itemize those receipts and upload them to a nap or whatever, I don't know.

Maybe it's a hot take, but, like, maybe your budget requires a little friction. Now I'm not saying it has to be this brand of friction, okay? But that I just want us to hold two things in both hands to say, yes, because life is crazy, we are tired. We want apps and hacks and things that make budgeting feel easy. On the other hand, managing a budget requires thought, care, and some work. From a budgeting app side of things, many apps are realizing that like this is a pain point for some users, like having to sit there and itemize everything and recategorize everything,

like takes a lot of time. And people want some level of automation and more accuracy, too. So I think there are some workarounds that you can use to sort of hack your budgeting app if it doesn't have the exact features that you're looking for just yet. It also raises the question of what's the purpose of budgeting at all? Because I think if your money is tight, budgeting is just a survival necessity. 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 your business. 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. 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. Okay. So I have three ideas for people who don't want to track every penny, but kind of empathize with the listener of like, okay, maybe I have a family. Maybe I do a lot of my shopping at Costco, Amazon, Target, Walmart, where your cart is just. to hodgepodge of things. If your goal is tracking your spending behavior, not your receipts to the penny like what 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, you know, 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, whatever, right? Again, personal to you, you could set your own threshold, but this could be a way to kind of lessen that fatigue. I like that. Okay, the third option, it might appeal to parents. You could create a, like a family flex category in your budget that contains all your target runs, your Costco halls, your Amazon orders, whatever that may be.

You could fund this intentionally each month. Again, you'd probably need to look back. and see how much generally you're spending monthly at these stores. So you'd care less about the exact category that the items are falling under. You just know this is sort of my threshold for all of these stores, our household kind of expenses. And I just don't want to go over that amount every month. So you could avoid burn out that way. I like those.

That does seem pretty adaptable. So each spending and tracking style could kind of fit into each of these. All right. Well, this is the part of the show. I just made it up because now it just become a part of our show where we talk about our own business. Okay. So I want to hear about each of you. How would you tackle this issue or just how do you budget generally?

So tell me, Amanda, you go first. How do you do it? We have a joint credit card where we put our household and shared expenses and we get travel points that way. So we like to kind of consolidate it that way. And we have a limit for what we want to spend there each month. And we try to come under it always. so that we can put more into our savings. But the only thing that doesn't go on that is any target purchases because I have a red card.

So I like to get that extra 5% discount and we just pay that like we would a normal credit card every month. What about you, Elizabeth? How do you handle it? Well, so I have what I would like to label an ADHD budget. So I do a little bit of pay yourself first and also kind of 50, 30, 20. So all my savings, retirement savings come out of my paycheck first. And then I have my fixed expenses. So I know a certain amount I have to spend on my fixed expenses every single month.

And then the rest is a free for all girl, do what you want. So I kind of just separate, in other words, my needs versus my wants after I pay myself first. And then I just track my spending as the month goes on. So if I'm close to my limit, then it's like, hey, girl, you got to pull back spending. But something else that I find that I do a lot is when I am looking at what I spend, because I usually check my spending at least once a week. I usually find themes with how I'm feeling because that really impacts my spending. So I find when I'm in a very balanced place, I don't really overspend, you know.

I buy essentials. Sometimes I spoil myself, but I'm pretty on budget. But if I am maybe going through a difficult time or in need of a lot of comfort, then I find myself spending more. So I more look through what I'm spending as a reflection of my feelings and maybe where I need to adjust. Does that make sense? I feel that.

It sounds like we need an emotional spending category in your budget. Yes. Oh my gosh. Yes. Another sinking fun, Sean. Exactly. Well, that's the beauty of a budget, right? Like when you look through the budgeting apps, there's always some category you could rename, okay, you don't have a pet. Well, I'm going to rename this like your emotional spending category. Get the fancy coffee cream or get whatever the little thing is that makes you feel good. This is my pot of money that I used to process the trauma of the world on a regular basis. I had to wake up and do XYZ today. I need to treat myself. So honestly, I could never track every dollar. Let me not say never. There have been times where I've been overspending month to month. And again, I'm like, okay, what am I doing and what's happening? But I think it's so important with finances that you do something you can commit to. And I just could not commit to tracking every single dollar. I budget really similarly to you, Elizabeth, actually. And instead of doing zero based, I like to think of it as like broad based budgeting, where I do pay myself first, where I have my money going and to my various savings accounts, and then what I have in my fund money account, that's the amount

that I can spend on whatever random things I need that month. But I'm not counting every penny as precisely as I probably would have been in my early 20s when I was pretty broke. So again, it depends on the phase of life that you're into. Listener, I hope this has helped you sort out how you're going to sort out your expenses. If anyone listening has their own fun, wacky, weird budgeting tips because we all have our own. Let us know we always love to hear them. And Amanda, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us about this. Thanks for having me. You know I love talking with you guys. Listeners, that's all we have for this episode. If you want us to give your budget a makeover so you can better track your expenses or maybe just reach a financial goal, then fill out

the application form in today's show notes. To have the nerds answer your money question, call or text us your questions at 901 730 6373. That's 901 730 NERD. You can also email us at podcast at nerdwallot.com. And our next episode is timely because we are going to be chatting about the best budgeting app for you. Look at that right on time. Follow smart money on your favorite podcast app. That's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and IHeartRadio to automatically download new episodes. Here's our brief disclaimer. We are not your financial or investment advisors. This nerdy info is provided for general educational and entertainment purposes and may not apply to your specific circumstances. This episode is produced by Tass Figgland, Hillary Georgie Help with Editing, Nick Carissa Me and Eve Krogman, Halmar Audio and Video Production,

and a big thank you to NerdWallis editors for all their help. And with that said, until next time, turn to the nerds.