The complete sinking funds list: 60 expenses by category
Most budgets are built for the month they’re written in. Rent, groceries, transport, the usual. Then March arrives with a car service, an annual insurance renewal and a dentist appointment in the same fortnight, and a budget that was working fine suddenly isn’t.
Nothing went wrong. The expenses weren’t unexpected — a car service is about the least surprising thing that can happen to a car. They just weren’t monthly, and a monthly budget has nowhere to put them.
That’s what sinking funds are for. This page is the long version: a list you can read down and tick against your own life. We’ve sorted it by category rather than by size, because the useful question isn’t “what’s expensive” — it’s “what have I not thought about.”
If you want the concept explained properly first, we wrote that up separately in sinking funds: the envelope trick that kills surprise expenses. The short version is below.
The short version
A sinking fund is money you set aside a little at a time for something you know is coming. Not an emergency fund — those are two different jobs.
- Emergency fund: the genuinely unexpected. Losing work. A boiler that dies without warning. One pot, ideally untouched.
- Sinking fund: the entirely expected thing you just haven’t been setting aside for. The boiler service. One pot per expense, refilled monthly, and spent on purpose.
The trick isn’t complicated. It’s that most people run these expenses through their current account and absorb them as shocks, when they could be running them through twelve small monthly transfers and absorbing nothing at all.
How to work out the monthly number
Three steps, and the arithmetic is deliberately boring.
- Write down the expense and roughly what it costs. Rough is fine. “Car service, about €300” is more useful than a precise number you never write down.
- Note how often it happens. Once a year, twice a year, every three years.
- Divide the cost by the number of months until you next need it.
A €300 car service due in ten months is €30 a month. A €600 Christmas, started in July, is €100 a month. A €900 laptop you expect to replace in three years is €25 a month.
Do that for every line you tick below, add up the monthly figures, and you get one number: what your budget was quietly short by every month. It is usually larger than people expect. That’s not a failure of budgeting — it’s the first time the real cost of the year has been visible in one place.
A word of warning that we’d rather give up front: the total will probably look impossible at first. That’s normal, and it’s not a reason to stop. Skip to how many to actually start with before you decide anything.
The list
Sixty expenses, by category. Not all of these apply to you — most people will tick fifteen or twenty. The point of a long list is that it’s easier to recognise something than to remember it.
Car and transport
- Annual service and inspection
- New tyres
- Road tax
- Car insurance, if you pay it yearly
- Repairs and parts that aren’t emergencies — brakes, battery, clutch
- Breakdown cover
- Parking permit
- Driving licence renewal
- Annual public transport pass
- Bike servicing and replacement parts
- The next car, or the deposit on it
Home
- Boiler service and chimney sweeping
- Home or contents insurance renewal
- Your insurance excess — the part you pay when you claim
- Appliance replacement: washing machine, fridge, oven
- Bed and mattress
- Furniture that’s on its last legs
- Repainting and small repairs
- Garden, tools and outdoor maintenance
- Chimney, gutters, roof checks
- Annual service charges or building fees
- The deposit on your next flat, if you rent
Health and body
- Dental treatment beyond a check-up
- Glasses, contact lenses, eye tests
- Physiotherapy and treatment courses
- Prescriptions and repeat medication
- Health insurance excess or annual premium
- Vaccinations and travel health
Family and people
- Christmas presents
- Birthdays — write down how many you actually buy for
- Weddings: gift, outfit, travel, accommodation
- Christenings, funerals, and the travel they involve
- School uniform, books and supplies
- School trips
- Childcare that spikes in the holidays
- Children’s activities paid termly
- Pet vaccinations and annual check-ups
- Pet insurance excess, boarding, grooming
Work and admin
- Professional memberships and registration fees
- Training, courses and certifications
- Tools, equipment and work clothing
- Accountant or tax filing fees
- Tax set-aside, if you’re self-employed
- Passport renewal
- Visa and residency fees
- Document translation and certification
Money and fees
- Annual card fees
- Annual banking or account fees
- Software and app renewals — the yearly ones you forget until they charge
- Domain and hosting renewals
- Streaming plans billed annually
- Gym membership paid yearly
Seasonal and fun
- Christmas travel — often larger than the presents
- Summer holiday
- Weekend trips
- Festivals and events
- Winter coats, boots and seasonal clothing
- Sports gear and equipment replacement
Things that quietly wear out
- Phone — the one that will be unusable in about two years
- Laptop, tablet, headphones, and the rest of the drawer
How many should you actually start with?
Not sixty. Almost nobody funds sixty sinking funds, and trying to is the fastest way to abandon the whole idea in week three.
A reasonable starting point is three to five, chosen like this:
- The one that hurt most recently. Whatever caught you out in the last year, start there. You already believe in that one.
- The largest predictable expense in the next twelve months. Usually Christmas, a holiday, or a car service.
- One boring, unglamorous one. Insurance excess or annual fees. Small, dull, and the reason a fortnight goes badly when it lands.
Then add one whenever a bill surprises you. Over a year or two the list builds itself out of your actual life rather than out of an article on the internet, which is a considerably better source.
If the full total looked impossible earlier, this is the reason it doesn’t matter. A partly-funded sinking fund is not a failed one. Having €180 towards a €300 car service is a meaningfully different situation from having nothing, and no version of this requires you to fund everything at once.
What this doesn’t do
Worth being straight about the limits.
Sinking funds don’t create money. If the honest total is larger than what’s left after your bills, no amount of categorising fixes that — the list has told you something real about your income and costs, which is useful information, but it isn’t a solution on its own.
They also assume the money arrives on a schedule. The maths still works if your income varies, but it needs a buffer sitting underneath it, which is a slightly different setup — budgeting on an irregular income covers that.
They also don’t cover genuine emergencies. That’s a separate pot doing a separate job, and raiding your sinking funds to cover one is how people end up back where they started in April.
And they take a few months to feel like anything. The first month, you’ve moved some money and nothing has visibly improved. Around month four, a bill arrives that would normally have been a bad evening, and it’s just a transfer. That’s the entire payoff, and it’s quiet.
Where to keep them
Practically, you need each fund to be separate enough that you don’t accidentally spend it, and accessible enough that you’ll actually use it when the bill comes.
People do this in different ways, and none of them is wrong:
- Separate savings accounts — clean, but tedious once you have more than three or four.
- One savings account, tracked on paper or in a spreadsheet — works perfectly, costs nothing, requires you to keep the record honest.
- Cash in physical envelopes — the cash stuffing approach. The ritual genuinely helps people, though cash that’s lost or stolen is gone, and it can’t pay an online invoice.
- A budgeting app with envelopes or categories — the money stays in one account while the app tracks what each pot holds.
That last one is what we’re building. Sprigly is an envelope budgeting app where every category is its own envelope, your data stays on your device, and there’s no bank login involved. It’s pre-launch — you can join the waitlist if you’d like to hear when it’s ready.
The method works regardless of which of those four you pick. It’s worked for a very long time in shoeboxes.
Save the list. Ticking it once a year — usually in January, when last December is still fresh — is the whole maintenance routine.