Automatic budgeting

2020-Aug-30

If you do this one thing, you’ll have a lot more money and a lot less worry, without any concerted efforts to earn more or restrict your spending. Probably the only way it won’t change your life is if you’re already doing it.

It isn’t difficult and it requires no new skills, only a few minutes here and there, and perhaps a daily alarm, or a strategically placed sticky-note, to remind you to do it.

Here it is: you ledger your income and expenses. Any money that enters or leaves your possession, you track in a spreadsheet or ledger by category. Then look at the totals at the end of the month. As a failsafe, sit down once a week for twenty minutes to make double-sure you did it.

That’s the entire commitment—just tracking the income and out-go. You’re free to buy whatever you want, as long as you track it

From <https://www.raptitude.com/2017/06/where-personal-breakthroughs-really-come-from/>

It works because it’s impossible to be aware of the actual numbers behind your behavior without your priorities changing. It becomes easy to see where you’re getting value and where you’re not.

From <https://www.raptitude.com/2017/06/where-personal-breakthroughs-really-come-from/>

The magic of tracking without striving

I’ve spent my entire adult life experimenting with self-improvement campaigns of all sorts, and nothing has worked better than tracking alone. Just recording the numbers—without striving to change anything about what you’re tracking—almost always creates a sustainable, healthy transition to a better way of doing things.

It sounds radical: let yourself do what you want as long as you track it. But it leads to lasting change far more quickly and painlessly than the conventional method: striving to meet arbitrary, self-imposed quotas, hoping it will one day stop being so painful.

From <https://www.raptitude.com/2017/06/where-personal-breakthroughs-really-come-from/>

Breakthroughs come from awareness, not from willpower or “grit”, or any other forceful qualities we never have enough of. They come from understanding our behavior, not from policing it.

From <https://www.raptitude.com/2017/06/where-personal-breakthroughs-really-come-from/>