Practical tips to organize your spending—and actually stick to your budget.
Budgeting doesn’t just mean setting limits; it means understanding where your money is going and why. That’s where Origin’s tagging and grouping features come in. With just a few tweaks, you can make your budget more insightful, more personalized, and way easier to manage.
Here are five ways you can make the most of these features.
Instead of setting isolated budgets for Restaurants, Groceries, and Meal Kits, group them into a single Food budget. The same goes for:
Why it helps: You’ll stop sweating small shifts between categories and focus on the total picture of your spending behavior.
Tagging lets you track spending trends across any theme you care about, regardless of category. Some ideas:
Why it helps: Over time, your tags reveal patterns that aren’t obvious at the category level, so you can reflect and adjust smarter.
Origin now lets you set monthly budgets at the group level. To get started, go to Edit Budget and choose whether you want to budget by categories or groups. From there, you can say, “I only want to spend $600 on my Food group this month,” even if that’s split between restaurants and groceries.
Pro tip: Try setting your group budgets first, then work backward to assign category-level targets.
Why it helps: You don’t need to micromanage every dollar.
Once you’ve been using groups for a few weeks, filter your Breakdown & Budget view by Groups (not Categories) to see which ones are trending over or under. This makes it easier to spot patterns and adjust before small overspends turn into big ones.
If your Shopping group is consistently over budget while Wellness is under, that’s a cue to rebalance — not to restrict, but to realistically realign with your goals and habits.
Budgeting by groups and tags isn’t about limiting yourself. It’s about creating a structure that reflects your real life — and your real values.
Try it today: 👉 Log in to Origin and customize your budget now