I don't have a spending problem in the obvious way. I don't buy expensive clothes, I don't upgrade my phone every year, I don't take big trips. But my bank statements look like I'm constantly leaking cash through tiny defaults: delivery fees, random convenience store stops, subscriptions I barely use, app purchases, "just this once" taxis, and impulse snacks that somehow happen every day. It's not one huge mistake, it's 40 small ones. I tried budgeting apps and I either obsess or I quit. I tried a no spend month and it turned into binge spending the next month. I want a simple system that catches the leaks without turning me into a monk. I know the common advice is build an emergency fund and follow the prime directive style steps, but I feel like I can't even get to that because the small stuff eats my margin.
I keep saving by not buying big things, but I'm bleeding money on small defaults and I don't know how to stop
byu/lovebaby inpersonalfinance
Posted by lovebaby
35 Comments
Try setting aside your monthly savings first. Then pay yourself from what’s remaining. Same with investing. Start now and set a small amount aside. Even $20 a month is fine. Then build on it. Get the ball rolling in your favor.
What are you willing to do to change your habits? Are you willing to sit down with your credit card statements and note the recurring subscriptions you don’t use and then contact the companies and cancel? Are you willing to remove your credit card information from online retailers you have used before? Are you willing to remove convenience apps from your phone? Are you willing to stock up on healthy snacks to have available at the time when you’ve previously splurged on convenience store snacks?
You have to change your habits. No amount of budgeting or tools are going to fix the issue. Start with fixing one thing at a time. After you break the habit, not doing it is second nature and its easier to move on to the next thing.
For me, I can’t buy *anything* unless I thought about it on a previous day.
Spending becomes way more planned.
I also have a “If something is below 75% of its original price, I can buy it immediately, but what I saved goes into a savings account”
and
“Anything below X amount don’t need thought” (but I rarely have the urge to buy cheap crap so it works for me)
I think that’s actually the most obvious / common spending problem. It’s the little things that eat up and people always struggle with money.
What are you willing to do? One “easy” trick is to start by paying yourself through a separate account/fund, as if it’s a bill.
I don’t typically recommend this approach, but it sounds like you’d really benefit from a cash envelope system. Decide how much you want to spend on small spending, put that much cash in an envelope, and always spend for those things out of that envelope. When that money’s gone, you’re done with that kind of spending for the month. You could even do it on a weekly basis to start if that helps.
I said “f it” and opened a new bank account and closed the original. I got a ton of emails from services saying “we couldn’t process your payment” and I was able to really consider if I needed their services or not.
Small changes. You’re aware of it which is a huge step in the right direction. Keep watching it and then start integrating changes. I’ve found that making it less easy to buy something helps me slow down on in person purchases. Like having to carry cash is more friction than having a card and once I’m out of cash, no more snacks for me until next month. For digital purchases, I use my PayPal fund and only put in like $20-30 a month. Planned amount of spending and once it’s gone for the month, that’s it until next.
Knowing I can still do the things but it’s limited by each separate bucket helps me stay more conscious about when I do spend. Do you have a larger goal you’d like to reach that you could daydream about when you’re tempted on impulse buys?
You have a common problem. It’s not that there isn’t any “extra” money in your budget. It’s that you KNOW there is extra money in your budget, so you spend every dollar of it .. multiple times. You save $100 by not buying that nice new jacket, and then you use that “breathing room” to spend $150 on other things.
Every payday, get a certain amount of cash at the ATM. That’s your walking-around money until next payday. Can’t pay for it with cash? You don’t buy it. Run out of cash? Looks like you’re eating mustard and saltines. That taught me really quickly how to sort wants from needs and necessities from luxuries. More important, it made me really evaluate those wants and luxuries. “Is this worth spending $20?” is a different question from “Is this worth spending the only $20 I have until Friday?”
I would go back to using one of the budgeting apps you tried if you liked one, or Origin, Monarch Money or Simplifi. Origin currently has a $1/year deal. Or your bank’s website of it allows for categorization of expenses and SPLITTING TRANSACTIONS between categories. That last part of the key. So you can’t bury your needless impulse buying during a trip to Target that you categorize as “Shopping” like most people do. Once you are categorizing with splits, don’t even focus on budgeting for the future right now. Just analyze your spending at the end of the the month. And really think about Where you are overspending and how to correct it the following month. Chip away at it month by month.
I can tell you from experience how SHOCKING it is when you finally reign things in and watch your account balance actually increasing every month, and that good feeling snowballs into even more focused spending control. But it has to start with no-excuses consistent accurate measurement of the exact things you are spending needlessly on.
Do you have a budget? If yes, set an allowance for those little expenses than seems reasonable to you, and spend within that allowance guilt free. If not… start by setting up a budget.
I see this all the time. Your brain is likely just tired from making big decisions all day. Try moving your fun money to a separate debit card each morning. When that specific balance hits zero, the small convenience stops simply have to end for the day.
Give yourself a weekly cash amount and leave your cards at home. Pack your lunch, stop ordering takeout and stop paying to have stuff delivered. If you can’t resist stupid tiktok purchases and such, delete the apps. Delete all card information from Amazon, Paypal, etc. Delete all those rarely used subscriptions. You are not missing out on anything by doing these steps. Your real life is waiting for you!
Little treats were becoming a bigger and bigger line in my budget, so I started buying them in bulk and set up a little treat drawer in my desk and at home. Now all of my favorite treats are right there so I don’t wander to the shop for something.
Same with coffee. I figured out how to make my favorite style at home, and I actually like it much more than going out for coffee, so that’s not a pull on my budget either.
It’s not that you can’t have little treats, just find a way to make it sustainable with your goals.
Can you make your cash access less accessible for a time? We use our electronics to pay for stuff but do you notice how convenient it is for all those “thousands tiny cuts” to our budget? Probably not.
You, like many people, pull out your phone or card for that impulse snack or convenience store purchase and just move along. You don’t see that cost again until you’ve got a service fee.
There are probably a bunch of great advice about budgeting etc in the responses, here but you should consider how easy it is for you to spend and maybe put a speed bump there. At least for trial run to see if that helps.
Go through all your subscriptions immediately, today, and cancel those you don’t need.
Stop getting food delivery.
Grocery shop once a week, and plan ahead what you’ll need to get.
Create an actual budget, leaving about 20% for miscellaneous costs since you have a track record of being unable to know what you spend money on.
Think about the habits, and how to lower their cost. If you’re hitting a convenience store for the same thing every day, buy at the grocery store and carry them with you.
Find one subscription you don’t really use, and cancel it.
Prep meals in advance and freeze so you’ve got something to toss in the microwave rather than get delivery. Etc.
This gets asked regularly and I always get down voted for saying to buy the big stuff. One big deliberate purchase will stop all other small purchases. Key is to make sure it’s something you really want.
Think of how much you make an hour. Then deduct some of that for tax, your takehome pay per-hour. Think of how many hours (or half hours) of work you need to do to pay for your stuff. Say you take home $13 an hour and you get DoorDash instead of cooking or going to pick up yourself. DD has upcharges, service fees and driver tip. You might have to trade a whole hour of work just to save yourself 20 mins of time over picking up for yourself.
This might not work for tiny 99 cent app purchases and $2 snack purchases but once a purchase with a short-term benefit (food delivery, taxis) starts creeping up to or above your hourly takehome pay, it gives you a new perspective.
Heck, it even works on big purchases. If you’re going to buy a $700 chair or a $200 handbag, it might actually be way more worthwhile of a purchase if you actually get more hours of use out of it than hours of takehome pay. I’m always hesitant to get new glasses when I need them, because of the cost, but then I remind myself I get 16 hours of use of them per day, every day. My glasses end up costing pennies per day.
This resonated a lot. What you’re describing usually isn’t a “spending problem” — it’s decision fatigue.
The issue with small defaults isn’t that they’re evil, it’s that they’re invisible. They never feel big enough to stop, but together they quietly erase your margin.
What helped me was switching from tracking everything to containing it. Instead of trying to catch every coffee or delivery fee, I do one weekly check-in and decide in advance what my “leak margin” is for that week. If I use it, fine. If I don’t, great. But I don’t renegotiate every day.
That way the small stuff has a boundary, without turning into restriction or obsession. Monthly budgets made me spiral. Weekly containment made it feel humane.
If it’s on your bank statement, it’s not cash, it’s a card.
Cards make spending too easy for some people to moderate.
Try carrying ACTUAL CASH. When you leave the house, figure out how much you consent to casually spending on that trip. Bring that much cash and no more.
Are you tracking your spending?
It’s easy to spend $10 on a delivery fee but it’s quite obvious when you add them up at the end of the month and it’s $250 total.
Also might feel expensive to spend $20 to cook a meal at home but then you realize it comes out to $4 a portion which is way cheaper than your $25 Uber Eats meal.
Awareness helps a lot.
Save first, spend what’s left.
When you get your paycheck, put money in your 401k/retirement account automatically, put money into your taxable account automatically, then have the rest put into an account you can spend.
Never touch the retirement account, only touch your taxable account for big ticket items that you plan for (house, car), then spend whatever is in your primary account.
How much do those 40 small spends actually add up to, is it a significant portion of your income or are you worrying about <10% of what you take home?
The reason the small things are eating you alive is because you’re still spending too much on rent, car payments, etc.
For right now, set a weekly cash budget for the small things and only pay in cash. When the cash is gone you’re done for the week.
Envelope method and direct deposit into savings.
Lots of good comments already. I’ll add that if you want to save money then you should start with a specific goal. Let’s say it’s $2k saved in the next 6 months (I don’t know what’s reasonable for you). But that would be about $150 every two weeks. When you get paid, you set aside that amount *at the beginning* and leave it be. Better yet, open a High Yield Savings Account with a separate bank (I personally use Ally, but there are many other good ones) and transfer the money over so you can’t easily access it if your spend starts to creep up.
This gets the money out of your spending accounts and makes saving a primary goal as important as paying your bills each month.
My approach is instead of focusing on intensive monthly budgeting, just set reasonable limits on each sub-category of spending, for example: eat out twice a month, one fun Amazon purchase per month (under $30), night out once per month (movie theater etc.), two streaming services at a time etc.
I would ask, what do you say to yourself before the purchase? Is it “I deserve this”? If so, that is the first thing you need to change. You’ve done the first step and looked at how often you do this. The next step I’d to figure out how much you can cut back. Maybe it is combining some of the small things, or I deserve a sweet treat, but I have those at home. You still treat yourself, but in a way you can control better.
Second, what are you saving for? It’s very difficult to “just save money” as a goal. Money in and of itself isn’t a thing. Money is a medium of commerce for things. Those dollars represent traded hours of your life. What do you want? Maybe it is an emergency fund so you sleep better at night. If so, that is what you need to tell yourself over and over. Don’t fall for the small traps. Maybe you don’t need an emergency fund for whatever reason, or you just aren’t there yet. What do you see doing with the money you save?
Last, I see hoarder/savers with an unhealthy relationship with money. They somehow see saving as virtuous and so save to be “better”. Or saving gives them safety but there is no amount of savings that will make them feel better.
Look at the why instead of the what.
From a different perspective: I have never paid a delivery fee and can’t even imagine what in-app purchases a person would be making. I’m sure we have different lifestyles and mine is indeed not really conducive to needing deliveries much…but maybe just a challenge to you to consider that those two expenses are something some people are never paying for at all. And not in comparative/im better kind of way, just like—those are expenses that aren’t in the regular spend of some households.
I still get fast food a lot, but I just always go get it myself…I guess I’ve never trusted delivery to be fast enough or worth the cost.
It seems you are looking for a magic solution for your problem, but none exists. If you want to stop spending then stop spending. It’s really as simple as that.
When I realized last year I wouldn’t be able to retire until my late 60’s at best if I kept up my poor spending/savings habits I signed up for YNAB and started using it to track spending and setting up a budget. Then I slashed my spending by cutting out those subscriptions, 7-11 trips, eating out several times a week, house cleaner, renegotiating bills, etc. I still go out to eat once every other week and haven’t been able to give up tobacco but holy crap do I Iove seeing the $400+ of monthly former leaky spending show up as increases in my investment accounts. This was all done out of desperation, but maybe you’re not desperate enough yet to do it? At this point I’d rather kick myself in the nuts than pay a delivery fee.
Figure out how much you want for discretionary spending and how much you want to save. Then automate your savings by direct depositing to your savings account or setting up an automatic transfer to your savings account.
Keep the numbers realistic so you can keep stock to it.
It’s a very hands on active approach but YNAB will help. Going through each and every transaction and approving them and seeing which categories you spend on helps me.
Maybe try eliminating the impulse to buy by having alternatives that are more affordable. Instead of ordering delivery, have a few frozen meals in your freezer. Instead of impulsively buying a snack or a drink, buy them in bulk and have your pantry and desk at work stocked. Then set a calendar event for once a month called “personal admin day” where you go through things like subscriptions and apps and other bill type things and use that time to unsubscribe and cancel any subscriptions and apps that are no longer serving you.
“default” is such an interesting word choice here, and you’ve used it a couple of times.
default can mean failure, but it can also describe “a situation or condition that obtains in the absence of active intervention.”
You say you want a simple system, but that will just give your core problem another outfit.
Your core problem is you are not spending mindfully. You are not making a conscious, consensual choice every time you commit to releasing your money.
That’s why it feels like a leak: energetically, you have become disassociated with what it feels like to say “yes, in the context of my values and goals and current situation, this is the right time and place for me to pay X for Y.”
When you are out of integrity, not fully in your body in the present moment, “impulse snacks somehow happen every day.” Somehow happen? Get curious about that: how does it actually happen? Why are you less aware of that happening when it is taking place? What in or around you is imparing you or taking your brain offline such that you are merely going through the motions?
See if you can identify patterns so you can experiment with circumnavigating them, disrupting them, preventing them entirely.
“subscriptions I barely use” – why did you sign up in the first place? Did you have a need for it that was more short-term and temporary than an ongoing subscription would make sense for? Was the marketing too good that your emotional sense eclipsed your intellectual capacity and you made a decision that your deepest self did not agree with?
Your problem is “not one huge mistake, it’s 40 small ones” but you “tried budgeting apps and either obsess or quit,” or “tried a no spend month and it turned into binge spending the next month” — so you recognize that this a subtle and chronic and persistent issue, yet you’re trying to solve this with huge all-or-nothing moves that are such a departure from your daily existence a backlash is inevitable?
What you need is something small you can practice in a small way often because your problems are small amounts, often.
The Envelope Method was developed for this kind of behavior optimization: instead of paying things online or digitally, you withdraw cash and fill envelopes for Rent, Groceries, Gas, Phone, etc. with the amount of cash they require every month. You can have a “subscriptions” envelope, or a “snacks” envelope. But the point is, when you are shuffling real tangible money, it’s a completely different somatic experience than buying stuff online.
Cash is clunky, obnoxious, slows you down because you have to count and do math, takes up space, but most importantly — it PHYSICALLY HURTS TO LET GO OF. And in your case, it probably SHOULD. That’s a feature, not a bug. Because when money is doesn’t hurt to let go of, you let go of way more than you want.
Digital purchasing (including credit cards, online, etc.) where you are not actually touching cash is a kind of dissociation that we’ve gotten really used to, AND we’ve seen get juiced up with all the tricks of the trade we’re used to seeing at casinos: bright colors, flashing lights, haptic feedback, little sensory stimuli tricks that actually give us a thrill and happy feeling — instead of the pain of losing cash.
The envelope method is harder to do in today’s mostly digital marketplace, but not impossible. You might find other versions or make up your own along the same lines. But the One Simple Practice that you need to be able to do multiple times a day in many different settings is to reacquaint yourself with the feeling of your time, attention, and energy leaving you with your full and informed consent and choice.
Not as a default.