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I just posted a question on this site and attempted to add a tag for budget, only to see that there are two tags "budget" and "budgeting" that as best I can tell are very similar if not identical...and that was a bit confusing to someone who is not a "pro" user of this site. Should these be tag synonyms? One tag appears to have significantly more use than the other tag.

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    Isn't one about low cost, and the other one about planning costs?
    – Gagravarr
    Commented Jan 31, 2014 at 12:25
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    See also the tag info pages budgeting vs budget (mouse over them to get the details when adding/editing a question)
    – Gagravarr
    Commented Jan 31, 2014 at 12:36
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    @Gagravarr. I understand the intended difference, but it is at least ambiguous. So a change would be helpful (but to what)
    – Bernhard
    Commented Feb 1, 2014 at 23:36
  • Our old overseer came up with the tag name budget` specifically for questions seeking cheap(est) / low cost / shoestring prices. At the time I argued it would lead to confusion with people working out a budget for their trip. I lost that argument. Much more recently it was obvious that we were gaining more and more questions about working out how much money to allow for, that were not necessarily about keeping costs to a bare minimum, so the budgeting tag was added, perhaps by myself. My opinion is that the two are very different and we need two tags but the old budget tag needs renaming.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 6:49
  • @hippietrail Maybe budget-travel?
    – starsplusplus
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 15:06
  • @starsplusplus: Yes I think budget-travel, low-cost, low-budget are all good and there might be others.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 15:11

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The distinction is this:

  • is for when you want something inexpensive (as opposed to, say, .) Couchsurfing, free public wifi, using libraries in towns you're visiting, that sort of thing. You want to save money.
  • is for the work of figuring out what something will cost, whether it's a luxury cruise, a set of flights, or a backpack-and-hitchhike tour of Europe. You want to plan your costs in advance.

Personally I would roll into since you can't make a reasonable cost approximation without doing a whole pile of planning. This would also eliminate confusion for people who don't use the adjective "budget" to mean low-cost, and see only the noun "budget" when they read the tag. There are only 10 questions tagged and 8 of those are closed. Making it a synonym feels like a good idea to me.

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    Tags merged as suggested. Not sure how we managed t miss this the whole time though.
    – mindcorrosive Mod
    Commented Feb 3, 2014 at 22:28
  • Yes merging "budgeting" and "planning" is also not a bad idea. I would still like to see "budget" renamed to something less ambiguous though since we're still going to have both "budget" and "budgeting" though one will be a redirect.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Feb 6, 2014 at 6:51

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