Here's a system I've been practicing pretty successfully for a few months.
Problem: spending too much money on luxuries.
Solution: look at your expenses and decide which categories of spending you want to reduce. Every time you buy something in that category, write it down.
Rationale: keeping track of stuff is painful. It's also embarrassing. By making yourself "confess" generally undesirable kinds of expenses, you will create a pressure to reduce them. This is the same principle behind negative tracking.
Example and caveats: you want to limit your confessions to really discretionary expenses. Confess necessary stuff and it becomes a meaningless pain -- you waste more time tracking and lose its deterrent power. Here are my categories: eating out, booze, gifts, (I tend to be more generous than I can afford), books/media, "luxury" groceries. Note that I accept and understand that I will and should continue to spend *some* money in these categories: I just want to spend less, to keep it in line. Knowing that I'll have to "confess" does this.
Results: my monthly credit card bills have been about 20-25% lower since I started this. Granted, it hasn't been a lot of time (I'll report back later after a full year or so), but I'm optimistic.
Implementational detail: I write my "confessions" as they happen on the back of my daily punch card. Once a month I transfer them to an excel spread sheet (titillatingly called confessions.xls).
Reinhard
Financial Confessions
Perfect! I made a stab at Your Money or Your Life earlier this year. I learned a lot and made a major attitude shift, but tracking every single cent I spent on ANYTHING got to be too much (analogous to calorie counting). This, on the other hand, is manageable. Will report back after I've given it a shot.
I recently started practicing this again (Depression II has been wonderfully inspirational!).
But now I'm tracking it in a box on my "big picture" instead of on the back of my daily cards.
This is a helpful change for two reasons:
1) I've explicitly spelled out the criteria for what constitutes a confessable expense: booze, restaurants, clothing, gifts, media. ("luxury groceries" involved too much head scratching -- I want to focus on the no brainers)
2) because I carry around each big picture for a week, it gives me a bit more context for budgeting. Most days, I don't have anything to confess, so it isn't really helpful to budget on that level. But I haven't gone a whole week yet without having had several. Pretty soon I expect to have a very precise sense of how much discretionary spending actually takes place on a weekly basis -- and how much more thrifty I can realistically expect to become.
Reinhard
But now I'm tracking it in a box on my "big picture" instead of on the back of my daily cards.
This is a helpful change for two reasons:
1) I've explicitly spelled out the criteria for what constitutes a confessable expense: booze, restaurants, clothing, gifts, media. ("luxury groceries" involved too much head scratching -- I want to focus on the no brainers)
2) because I carry around each big picture for a week, it gives me a bit more context for budgeting. Most days, I don't have anything to confess, so it isn't really helpful to budget on that level. But I haven't gone a whole week yet without having had several. Pretty soon I expect to have a very precise sense of how much discretionary spending actually takes place on a weekly basis -- and how much more thrifty I can realistically expect to become.
Reinhard