Ok, so, we all know that one of the first pieces of advice in any decent finance course is to budget. To track your money and figure out exactly what you're spending. To set fixed amounts for all the categories. Generally speaking, this is good advice.
But what if you can't do that? What other methods are available to you?
For me personally, whenever I try to actually track my spending in real-time, the record becomes inaccurate after about 3 days on which I actually spent money. I'm simply too distractible to keep an accurate record for longer than that. And of course, once it's inaccurate, I decide the whole tracking idea is worthless. (I'm the same with exercise - I'm far more likely to actually do exercise if I DON'T have to remember how many sets I did/how fast I went.)
So what do I do instead, considering that I do, in fact, manage to save money, despite being on a fairly low income?
It's all in the mindset.
What you want is to cultivate a mindset in which you no longer WANT to spend money. For any sizeable purchase (where by sizeable I mean more than a few pounds and not an essential like groceries), I usually would have to spend at least a month talking myself into buying it these days. My DEFAULT answer to somebody saying, "Hey, you should do this thing where you spend money!" is "No, I shouldn't. Who even needs that thing? What does it even do?" If the thing would, in fact, significantly improve my life, then the likelihood is that I will still be thinking about how awesome it would be a couple of months later, instead of having forgotten about it.
I combine this mindset with making a hypothetical budget every few months, where I put in my projected idea of my spending in all the categories and see if I'm roughly on track. This whole budget is an approximation, but it's a useful one. I do more than one, to cover the lowest projected spend (give myself something to aim for), the highest projected spend, including things I find slightly ridiculous (to check I'm still saving even at this point), and what I think will likely be my actual spend. But none of the categories I put here are strict, because truthfully because of my mindset I would like them all to be lower, and, also, if a fixed cost like a bill goes up, I can reduce one or more of the luxury categories to cover it, because all the luxury categories are my likely spending, and my true goal would be 0 for all categories in an ideal world.
I don't know how useful this strategy will be for anyone else, but I just thought I'd highlight that it is possible to save money even without keeping a strict, rigid budget and tracking all the time.
To cultivate said mindset in yourself, I'd advise practising it whenever possible, and also reading/watching as many things as possible that will persuade you that it's good to save money - i.e., plenty of MMM and ERE stuff, whatever other finance resources you can find, whatever films about saving money there are (I don't watch so many films about it, so can't advise here). Basically, rather than watching a bunch of stuff filled with adverts that are going to subtly normalise buying stuff to you, you want to read and watch a bunch of stuff that will have the opposite effect, or hang out with people who are also avoiding spending money.
An alternative method of budgeting without tracking which you could use, but I don't, is that envelope method I've seen talked about, where you put the cash for each category for the month in an envelope, and when it's gone, it's gone. Using your card is banned in this method, I think. This is a less advanced method for when you haven't yet cultivated a good anti-spending mindset, though.
Thoughts? Other ideas for avoiding spending when you can't budget in the way usually suggested?
Hopefully somebody will find this helpful. :)
