Amanda Barroso

Maybe it's a hot take, but maybe your budget requires a little friction.

Now, I'm not saying it has to be this brand of friction, okay?

But I just want us to hold two things in both hands to say...

Yes, because life is crazy, we are tired.

We want apps and hacks and things that make budgeting feel easy.

On the other hand, managing a budget requires thought, care, and some work.

From a budgeting app side of things, many apps are realizing that this is a pain point for some users, having to sit there and itemize everything and recategorize everything takes a lot of time.

And people want some level of automation and more accuracy too.

So I think there are some workarounds that you can use to sort of hack your budgeting app if it doesn't have the exact features that you're looking for just yet.

Right.

OK, so I have three ideas for people who don't want to track every penny, but kind of empathize with the listener of like, OK, maybe I have a family.

Maybe I do a lot of my shopping at Costco, Amazon, Target, Walmart, where your cart is just a hodgepodge of things.

If your goal is tracking your spending behavior, not your receipts to the penny like you're talking about, you could consider a merchant based budget.

where you designate like $200 at Costco every month, $150 at Target, whatever it is.

You could go back, look at the last six months of your spending at these types of stores and come up with an average or something like that.

Or if you're trying to lower it, you could challenge yourself a little bit and come in a little bit lower.

But consider the stores that you shop at the most and kind of give yourself a budget for those stores.

I'll admit this is kind of what my family does.

So if you're trying to avoid tracking fatigue, which I think our listener is, try picking a default category for each store.

So like Costco could be groceries.