You could also just be Sorta Bad With Money or A Little Bad With Money and I think this will also benefit you. I don’t want to alienate anyone on the Bad With Money spectrum.
Note: there are absolutely NO affiliate links or partnership links or anything like that in this post. I don’t want anyone to think this is just for money on my end and not trust what I’m telling you. This is 100% unsponsored. I am also NOT a financial advisor and am just sharing info that was helpful to me.
I would like to share the best thing I did in the last 6 months for my finances. And no, it’s not “create a budget” because I hate that option. I never stick to it and feel like I’m constantly failing.
And before you ask – yes, I am REALLY bad with money. Like, really. Tons of credit card debt and at any one time I always am paying off a personal loan I use to consolidate said credit card debt. Accounts are often closed on me and my debt sent to collections because I forget to pay it.
So yes, really bad with money. But this has massively helped:
I started a new checking and savings account at a different bank** than my regular one. This was the first important step – AT A NEW BANK. Even that small bit of extra effort it takes to transfer $$ between banks would be less tempting to my brain to do so. You’ll see what I mean.
I went into my work HR portal and set up my paychecks to automatically put 5% of my net income into this new savings account. I then transfer part of THAT money into my checking account and I tell myself I can’t “refill” it until I get paid again.
I use this debit card for all my discretionary spending – QuikTrip tea and grilled cheese, Chipotle, beer runs, etc. I’m now only using my regular account for rent, utilities, groceries/household items when running weekly errands, and other automatic payments.
And let me tell you, 5% of my public librarian paycheck, after taxes, health insurance, mandatory 9% to retirement, and the max HSA input I’m allowed, is pretty tiny.
But you know what? I haven’t yet been denied a purchase when trying to buy something because I would have over drafted.
I think my brain thought “we don’t have much spending money, so do we REALLY need to keep spending money at QT when you can make tea at work??” I therefore ended up SAVING MONEY from UNDERSPENDING on that 5% amount.
So much so, I didn’t have to put all $900 of my recent, unexpected new tires purchase on a credit card. A credit card, mind you, that I had literally just brought down to nearly no balance after getting a consolidation loan for part of my debt. There goes my much lower monthly debt payments, now that I have a massive charge on this credit card again.
I had to move pretty much all the money from my new savings account into my checking account so that I could pay $150 of that $900 out of pocket, but I’m going to keep telling myself it helped.
An added bonus I didn’t expect:
I now don’t have as much anxiety looking at my regular bank account. I used to pretend all was okay if I never looked at it. I actively avoided ever looking. Oh, need to fill in my bank account and routing numbers on something? I’ll pull up my tax records from 2014 to find it on the page about my direct deposit info.
But now I know exactly how much money to expect in there at any time, because it’s mostly all automated expenses. And I have ZERO anxiety looking at my new accounts. It’s not as big of a deal if I hit $0, since I don’t use it for anything automatic or for large purchases. This means I’m actually looking at it MORE often, which leads to making sure I DON’T hit $0.
So, if you’re like me and have always struggled with finances, I would recommend this method. It’s working out WAY better than I even imagined it could when I first decided to do it. If you have questions, feel free to ask!
P.S. You might be asking yourself, but Rambling Librarian, didn’t you just buy a camera? Why, yes, I did. Because I was doing so well with my finances, I thought it would be okay. But then I had to pay $900, one and a half times what I paid for said camera, on unexpected new tires and an alignment. And this is why I’m Bad With Money.
** I decided on Credit Karma Money. I already use it to monitor my credit and one day I logged in and saw info for the Credit Karma Money Credit Builder. I’ve always had awful credit, for reasons I listed above and thought might as well give this a try, since it costs nothing and doesn’t show a hard pull on my credit score. I don’t think you have to open both a checking and savings account for it, just a checking, but I did both anyway. Once again, I’m not being sponsored or anything by Credit Karma and clicking on that link in no way will benefit me, I’m just sharing because it helped me so far and want to spread the info to anyone else it might help.