Best Practice - Category for Financial Fraud Protection

Question

I use a credit monitoring service that watches for financial fraud in a variety of ways — monitoring the "dark web," looking for my email address and SSN, change of address monitoring, identity theft monitoring alerts, credit score tracking and others.

How would I categorize this service? The standard "Financial" category has a "Credit Report" subcategory. Maybe a new subcategory "Security Monitoring?"

I've got a separate category under "Home" for "Security & Home Automation," but that is for home security / alarm services.

Steve_Calif · Answer

@jacobs Thanks. I've got 34 top-level categories and 334 total categories. About 70 are unused largely because I use Quicken to manage an expenditure budget and not track investments.

Like you, I "avoid creating categories for expenses for a single payee unless it is significant in amount or meaning." My "Utilities" category has seven subcategories (phone, internet, nat gas & electricity, sewer, water)

If you pay for a credit report and security monitoring, and lumped them into the same category, would that be good enough for you to see them together, or do you want each on its own category line?

I'll have to think about that. Might be good enough with one subcategory under "Financial." The nice thing is it is easy to split into new subcategories or merge upward.

Steve_Calif · Answer

@QuickUserPSP Thanks. I like "Identity Theft Protection" and changed to that.

jacobs · Answer

I think it all depends on how much granular detail you want in your expense reporting. Yes, you can create a new subcategory if you want to see the amount of this one monthly bill broken out on its own line.

For what it's worth, I think the Credit Report subcategory you're seeing is something you created; it doesn't show up in a new blank Quicken Mac data file. If you don't need separate line items for Credit Report and Security Monitoring, you might just want to come up with a name which encompasses both, and edit that existing category name.

I generally try to avoid creating categories for expenses for a single payee unless it is significant in amount or meaning. for instance, I have separate subcategories for my water, sewer and electric utilities, even though each is a bill for only one payee; I want to be able to see my electric usage at a glance, not lumped in with other utilities. But someone else might be happy to have all these together under one category. If you pay for a credit report and security monitoring, and lumped them into the same category, would that be good enough for you to see them together, or do you want each on its own category line?

There's no right answer. I've seen people who have hundred and hundreds of categories and subcategories. To me, that would be too much detail for anything I'd use that reporting for. I have about 150, and I'm working to rename and merge some of them because I don't need all those things broken out the way I created them many years ago.