Good try, but maybe you didn't see this paragraph.
"So what should you do? Well, it helps to think of managing your finances as surfing a wave. When I got in touch with Harris at Personal Capital to ask him about his remark from last year, he suggested people simply monitor their expenses with great frequency, because the more you track spending, the easier it is to recalibrate when needed. In fact, it’s likely you’ll cut back altogether if you watch your outflows regularly. When behavioral economists Yaron Levi and Shlomo Benartzi studied the issue for Personal Capital, they discovered that new users of the firm’s app, which allows people to monitor both their bank and investment accounts, reduced their grocery bills by 20 percent and overall spending by more than 15 percent in the four months after installation."
I saw it, but the recommendation is not going to help the author. The author's problem is that she spends too much. Like most people, she grossly overestimates what she can safely afford, and fails to set aside enough to cover the predictable but irregular expenses, or the unpredictable ones.
Tracking past expenses will only help people who are willing to accept the notion that they can learn from past experience. This author doesn't seem to be in this category, because it's not the first time she's been financially embarrassed, and she definitely didn't pick up on the "annual" part of the annual condo assessment she had to pay last year. She actually seems to think her current situation is some kind of catastrophic, Nassim Nicholas Taleb style "black swan" experience. In reality it's a predictable consequence of her basic failure to keep her own ducks in a row.
The only reason there's not money in her account to cover the new expenses (one predictable, one not) is because it had already been spent on something else. Her money was not destroyed in a global economic collapse, nor was it stolen or vacuumed away by space aliens. Nobody lost their job or was hospitalized. These are normal expenses for the lifestyle the happy couple has chosen. They simply need to start cutting back until they've got enough to build a nice slush fund. That will tide them over until they either get better at budgeting (it takes practice), or develop an intuitive feel for financial equilibrium, which will give them spending habits proportionate to their income and also the ability to determine which expenses they can or cannot afford.
Those of us who don't use a written budget are simply good enough at predicting their future incomes and expenses, and prioritizing "needs" versus "wants", and selecting items that fall within what they can actually afford. They can do all of this without having to write anything down. It's a skill that comes with practice and experience. In some ways, it's like being able to do math in your head.
People who can't do math in their heads require a pencil or a calculator. This author, lacking the financial equivalent of being able to do math in her head, rejected the pencil and the calculator. You just can't fix that.
