Put another way:
The listed items are going to break unexpectedly and incur costs that must be paid or significant disturbances to your life will result... a kind of emergency
Except for the items that are "Regular maintenance" items (i.e. septic pumping).
Both "emergency" funds and "regular home maintenance" stuff SHOULD already be budget items already.
OK, it looks like we misunderstood each other. I use the term "emergency fund" in the classical sense as to refer to the cash that isn't invested that is available for immediate access when unexpectedly needed. "Emergency fund" is not a budget item for me, so anything that is paid for via the emergency fund still has to be on my monthly budget. When you said most of those items were budgeted in the emergency fund, I assumed you meant that they weren't accounted for at all (even indirectly) as a monthly expense, which is why I said that you were rationalizing away expenses to get your target number down for a lower 4% SWR and earlier FIRE. But since "emergency fund" is a budget item for you and includes those same expenses, then yes, that accomplishes the same thing as a separate "home maintenance" item does for someone else.
I was curious if maybe this has some up before about the emergency fund being a budget item, so I just looked over several threads discussing emergency funds and found no reference to anyone adding it as a budget item until I got to this one:
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/ask-a-mustachian/what-non-monthly-things-to-you-budget-for/
Only the last two people posting there listed "emergency fund" as a separate budget item, but one specifically added "currently funded" as if it had reached a minimum threshold and that he was no longer budgeting additional funds for it. So, it looks to me as if most people don't have emergency fund as an ongoing budget item to amortize the expense over the long haul, which is how I was understanding your position. Since you have it as a budget item, that is different, and seems like an acceptable alternative.
As such, budgeting for each individual thing makes about as much sense to me as having separate line items on your budget for salt, sugar, flour, tortillas, pickles, ketchup, deli ham, etc...
I didn't mean that anyone should have each of those items listed separately in a budget. I meant that the total cost of those maintenance items should be "accounted for" in your budget under the relevant line item (e.g. the $400/mo home maintenance). I have the single home maintenance line item in my budget, that I mentioned increasing earlier in the thread. A breakdown can be documented elsewhere without cluttering up the budget with all the finer details of what makes up that budget item. If emergency fund is a budget line item and includes some of those expenses, that accomplishes the same thing.
No, we understood each other, we just deal with this stuff very differently apparently.
No, we actually did NOT understand each other, but it was an even bigger misunderstanding than I originally thought. Even in my last post I kept mentioning your emergency fund budget item since you had previously posted, "Both "emergency" funds and "regular home maintenance" stuff SHOULD already be budget items," and, "I can EITHER budget for 'paying for emergencies.'" But now, I am to understand that you don't actually have an emergency fund budget item after-all because you now have said this instead:
My emergency fund will fund an emergency <snip>, then I take money from my discretionary spending and replenish it
OK, that's different, you are using your discretionary spending budget to fund your emergency fund and pay your home maintenance from that. On your budget, those expenses are essentially hidden within your discretionary budget item. So this is now my third understanding of how you are handling it as you have posted these new details in follow-up posts that I would never have assumed based on the previous posts. So hopefully that is the correct understanding finally. With that, it turns out that your emergency fund is of the classical sense, just like mine, not a line item on your budget as I misunderstood in my last post. The difference from me is in how you fund it.
it makes more sense to me to maintain a fund to cover unexpected expenses/emergencies and replenish it when it's used than to set money aside continually for something I may never even need to spend money on.
I guess my experience in accounting and budgeting helps me out here. I've been budgeting like this for 25 years, and I realize that money doesn't have to be physically "set aside". All that matters is that these expenses are accounted for and can be paid for over the long term while keeping my total stache at a level to sustain a 4% WR (of initial balance plus increased for inflation each year). If you're owning a home long term, you can pretty much count on all/most of these over the long haul, some may end up being less, some may be more, but I prefer having my best estimate in a comprehensive maintenance budget item rather than taking those funds from a completely unrelated budget item on as as-needed basis.
If you would rather never reduce your discretionary/fun spending temporarily (if at all depending on stash/WR at the time),
What I want is to keep the certainty of significant maintenance costs out of my discretionary spending budget line item, where it doesn't belong IMHO. I don't consider home maintenance and emergencies to be discretionary since they are required. And I don't want my discretionary budget item to be over-inflated due to it being used as a replenishing source for emergencies/maintenance. I also don't want to make the mistake of over-spending money as "discretionary" that could come back to bite me down the road because I used it as "fun" money when I should have been accounting for inevitable expenses down the road that would require me to back off on true discretionary spending in order to replenish the emergency fund rather than if those expenses were being accounted for each month separately from discretionary, as I am doing.
and would prefer to reduce it permanently to continually fund expenses that while "likely" are of an "unknowable cost (who knows what prices of things may be 20, 30, + years from now) and to be spent at an unknowable time (who knows when that window will need replaced etc)",
As for future pricing, 4% plus increased for inflation each year accounts for price changes. Most things don't increase in price lock-step with CPI, and that goes for your entire budget. But by using inflation adjusted withdrawals, you are accounting for those increases in cost in a practical way. You're never going to get budgets to the exact dollar for home maintenance or anything else that changes monthly or yearly. That doesn't mean you should remove all those things as budget items and try to cover them under discretionary spending. It's no different with maintenance to me. It just makes more sense to me to account for those expenses as maintenance instead of as part of discretionary spending.
To each their own. I just wanted to give my opinion on how to handle such things. It's only one opinion and not any more valid than any other opinion on the subject.
I am not saying your opinion is wrong, although the OP would still need to account for those expenses somewhere, whether it was though a maintenance budget like me or through "additional" discretionary spending like you. I only disagreed with you originally because I completely misunderstood you. As it turns out, I still misunderstood you during my last post, but I think we got that cleared up now, and I finally understand how you're handling it. In a nutshell, it looks like we're not doing it all that differently. We both have emergency funds, and we are funding it to pay for these large maintenance expenses when they come up, but your emergency fund is replenished by your discretionary spending budget item which may cause you to reduce "fun" activities at times during fund replenishment while my emergency fund is funded by my maintenance line item, so my discretionary budget item remained unchanged. At the end of the day, we are both covering those expenses in a monthly expense item, which I didn't think you were doing after your very first post. We're replenishing from "different" expense items, but that's six one way, half a dozen the other. The dollars are still budgeted for one way or the other.
I should add that my discretionary spending line item is whatever is left over after expenses, and I don't normally spend most of it, but I actually save most of it. In fact, I saved over 90% of it in 2016, which is why I had an 80% to 83% savings rate last year (depending on method of calculation as posted in another thread.) But I certainly don't use that part of my budget for home maintenance, nor use it for groceries, or anything else that I have a budget item for. I want those things to be accounted for in the budget rather than hidden within my discretionary spending. But if that works for you, that is great. The end dollars will still work out. I am not trying to talk you out of it, only explain what I misunderstood about your method originally and why I prefer my way, which I've now been doing for 25 years. Good luck and thanks for sharing your method. Some people may prefer your way, and that's fair. And then there are people that do it differently from both of us, such as a couple people in the thread that I linked to earlier who actually had an emergency fund monthly expense budget item to replenish their emergency funds. That's fair also.