Trying to rally my wife... (budget category recommendations?)

[Pixelshot]

With the goal of getting my wife behind a more stringent saving strategy, I have been compiling lots of personal (family) data on how much we spend. Most of it comes from Mint, which I find is a very useful tool, until it's not. One of my complaints is that Mint won't allow me to make/edit custom parent categories for transactions (yes, I can create sub-categories). So, I'm left with the following list, which I find too specific and a bit annoying:

Auto & Transport
Bills & Utilities
Business Services
Education
Entertainment
Exclude from Mint
Fees & Charges
Financial
Food & Dining
Gifts & Donations
Health & Fitness
Home
Income
Investments
Kids
Personal Care
Pets
Shopping
Taxes
Transfer
Travel
Uncategorized

---
These categories are ok, but some of them I would like to completely get rid of ("shopping"? How un-category can you get??)

For the sake of tightening our expenses, these categories are too granular. What I really want/need is something like this:

Rent
Utilities (water, gas, power, phone)
Savings
Loan payment
Food
Transportation
OTHER  (?)

MY QUESTION is this:
Do any of you have a useful list of simple expense categories that I can track on a given month that will help to focus on what expenses I can really attack? Most of them are pretty stringent (rent/utils/loan, etc). Yes, they can be tightened, but I feel like really freeing up money will require being able to build simple compartments, track them, then tighten as possible.  Imagine a pie chart that shows our expenses. It would be most helpful if I could show a group of not-so-necessary spending - as in the OTHER category above.

Bonus question:
Anyone use Mint to do this (i.e. tracking in simple terms, rather than super granular)?

Thanks!

[Gone Fishing]

I've never used Mint.  My expense categories are simple: mortgage (inlcudes taxes and insurance), groceries, and credit card.  The mortgage never changes, and groceries are pretty consistent as well.  That leaves the credit card which includes many relatively "fixed" expenses: internet, phone, commuting gas, Netflix etc, the rest is descretionary.   We have an agreed on cap on the credit card.  About mid month, I project out gas and any other planned expenses.  At that point we know how much we have left for either fun stuff, or other non-urgent "wants".         

[Zette]

I use YNAB, so I can't speak for Mint, but I have only 4 master categories:  Spending, Bills, Goals, and Reimbursable

Spending has all the small day to day purchases.  This is where I need to focus when making spending decisions:
Groceries
Target/Walmart
Costco
Restaurants
Fuel
Medical (copay, prescriptions, etc)
Repairs (minor)
Kid Stuff
Fun Money
etc
 
Bills has the stuff that is periodic, and usually small, predictable variation:
Housing (Mortgage, Property Tax, Insurance)
Semi-Annual Bills (car ins, life ins, car registration, AAA, memberships...)
Monthly Bills (water, electric, phone, cable...)

Goals is for emergencies and large purchases:
Reserve (car, medical, home)  -- for insurance deductibles and large repairs
Vacation
Big Items (furniture, new computer, major home improvements etc.)
Christmas and Birthday (I just like this to have its own category instead of lumping it in spending)

Reimbursable
Business Travel

[rujancified]

I'm may not be super helpful, but I commiserate. This is specifically why I quit using Mint. I used it for awhile and loved the 'big picture'-type functionality, but I felt like it was both too specific and too general for what I wanted.

I will say that if I were your wife and you showed me that first list of categories, I'd probably run away screaming! So many options.

I prefer a high-level approach for budgeting/tracking and the ability to drill down when something is out of whack:

Income
House (Rent or Mortgage, HOA, Taxes)
House Maintenance (Lowe's, Terminex, anything that happens at our rentals)
Vehicle/Transportation (Bus pass, car payment, insurance, bike maintenance, tag fees)
Short Term Savings (this is where we save up for our annual car insurance premiums/registrations, any vacations, etc. I need to do better here now that we're in a house vs a condo)
Long Term Savings (Retirement, Investments)
Food/Grocery
Food/Dining out+Alcohol (I only have two food categories b/c we're having a bit of a "problem" eating at home lately and a bit of a problem going out to bars too often)
Shopping (We don't spend much here, so a generic category is okay for us. When we have kids, I will want more categories most likely)
Other debt payments (if exists)
And (DUH) Utilities

[Yndrd]

My workaround for this is to set a budget for Miscellaneous expenses and then use that to aggregate all those other granular top level categories.

For instance, I set Misc to $135 and set a budget of $0 to the other categories for which I want to track spending but don't necessarily want to budget money to every month. When you want to buy some new sneakers you can reduce the misc budget and increase Shopping as necessary while maintaining a constant overall budget.

[BooksAreNerdy]

Another YNABer here.

Master category: Home
Mortgage
Utilities
Internet/phone
Groceries
Misc

Master category: transportation
Gas
Maintenance
Tags/Insurance

Master category: personal
Gym/shoes
Clothes/haircuts
Kids/preschool
Dog
Chickens
Entertainment
Gifts/Xmas

Master category: savings
Emergency fund (this is in an online savings acct)
Vanguard (this money sits in the checking acct until there is enough to sweep into vanguard)