Hi Tiller Community, every Tuesday we are looking to tap into your experiences and expertise to share on a weekly question.
What is your strategy for unexpected expenses?
Comment below! Share your strategy.
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist
Hi Alice,
I use the Savings Budget add-on sheet. Because it rolls over each category’s unspent funds from the previous month into available funds for the current month, it works beautifully for reallocating funds to a different budget category on an as-needed basis (as well as assuring I have enough money in categories to pay large expenses that occur every 6 months or annually, like home or auto insurance.) I created an expense category named “Rainy Day” that I can tap for unexpected expenses or periodic overages in any category. If I have enough Rainy Day money to cover the unexpected expense, I move the funds from Rainy Day into whichever category the unexpected expense is in, using the +/- functionality.
If Rainy Day doesn’t have enough funds, I will reallocate funds from a different budget category or, if it’s a very large unexpected expense, I’d transfer funds from my Emergency Funds savings account and add them to the appropriate category using the +/- functionality.
~Rebecca
The answers will probably depend on if one uses the budget sheet or not. As I don’t when something comes up that’s unexpected i put it in the normal category. Then. whenever I do a quarterly or annual review i see what pops out, and so over time which each instance may be unique, overtime they should average out to costs that can then be budgeted for like a “rainy day fund.”
Because most costs shouldn’t be unexpected, they were just forgotten about or ignored.
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Good morning @Rebecca.S I had some unexpected bills this week as I traveled to the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. (Big nerd fest of Google’s big announcements for the year.) My first unexpected “bill” was $6 for drip coffee at the hotel. Okay… that doesn’t quite meet the level of “unexpected bill”, I could have chosen not to have coffee at 6am… but is that really a choice 
Thank you for sharing the Savings Budget template for the Tiller Foundations Template. Rolling over budgeted funds is a great way to make sure it is available when you actually need it. The “Home repairs” category is not consistent each month!
That’s exactly where a template like the Savings Budget really shines, helping to smooth out those lumpy expenses.
For anyone following along who is curious about how this works with the Savings Budget template that @Rebecca.S shared, it is a simple envelope or rollover savings concept. This means when you have a month with lower home repair costs, the unspent money in that category can be set to automatically carry over. So, when a bigger repair bill does come along, you’ve already got funds set aside. The Tiller Community information also notes you can activate these savings workflows on a category by category basis, which gives you so much flexibility.
The template also has handy in dashboard workflows to modify budgets and savings values. So if an unexpected bill pops up in one area, or you just want to reallocate funds (like you mentioned with your “Rainy Day” category strategy, Rebecca!), it’s straightforward to do. All those changes are then logged in a Budget Journal sheet, which is great for keeping track of your adjustments.
Thank you @Rebecca.S for this great strategy!
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Great point @ctlee , costs should not be “unexpected” … getting your budget to where you really are accounting for everything is certainly a goal!!!
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist
I agree, @ctlee. I don’t use the budget sheet, either. Never have. And thanks @TillerAlice, for providing a clear explanation of the Savings Budget sheet.
My Rainy Day category was created primarily to house unexpected income from gifts, etc, and to avoid making a transfer transaction from my bank account. Should a small or moderate unplanned expense or overage crop up in a particular category, I can reallocate funds to a different category, but that happens very rarely.
I faithfully lived by a budget for over 40 years. Now retired, I mostly use Tiller to track my transactions and spending. That said, I determine my category budgets the same way I calculated my budget during my working years. I calculate all known expenses in each category for a year, using the previous year’s expenses as a guide, divide by 12 to arrive at the monthly amount, and add in a little extra to prepare for inevitable increases in insurance payments, etc, so that any surprises are mostly covered in advance. All of my categories are broad, and I use tags liberally as “sub-categories” for tracking purposes. For example, I use tags for “gasoline,” “parts/service,” “insurance,” and “parking” to break out types of expenses in my Auto and Transportation category. Likewise, my Food category captures grocery, dining out, or coffee stops.
~Rebecca
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I use a modified version of the Savings Budget sheet. I have it calculate an emergency fund amount, then everything allocated to envelopes and needed to fully fund them, then compare that to my liquid accounts and my credit card.
I try to keep that “available unallocated” number higher, if I possibly can, and at the end of the month, I try to allocate those funds back to some envelopes, including an “unexpected expenses” envelope that I try to keep as high as I can. At the end of my fiscal year (end of June), I’ve also been “releasing” saved funds that are over budget back to the “general fund” and move at least some of that over to unexpected expenses.
I treat the emergency fund number as inviolable: that’s what I would need to cover six weeks of budget if something happened where both me and my wife lost our jobs. We don’t touch that at all unless we absolutely have to. It’s not just rainy day money, it’s saving us from a catastrophe money.
The “unexpected expenses” fund is there for when things break and we don’t have a specific budget that can handle them. Like on Saturday this past week, I found out I could no longer get a critical part for the ancient dryer I have been limping along with repairs every 3-6 months for the past four years, so we needed to replace it. That day. We had enough in the unexpected expenses fund saved up to cover that. I put it under “home improvement” but moved some unexpected funds over to that category to make up the difference in the budget. I want that to show up when I do my end of year (technically mid-fiscal year) review end of December/early January as an overage from the actual budget, because I want to track how well we did against the actual budget. Using tags lets me flag it as an unexpected expense so I know how well we did planning and if anything went wrong we didn’t plan for. This was really helpful in my 2025 year end review and I expect it’s going to be useful again in my FY 25 review in a few months.
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