Sean Pyles

And then as people's incomes grow or maybe their expenses lower,

sometimes it can be really easy to just not budget at all.

And the reality is that a lot of people, and this is kind of a secret of the financial planning world, is that most people don't really have a great grip on their monthly expenses and how much they're spending on a regular basis.

That can be okay as long as you have the infrastructure in the background to make sure that you are saving regularly, you're paying off your debt, yada, yada, yada.

If you get to a comfortable enough place of having your finances sorted,

I actually don't know if you need to track every single penny.

That's why I don't do that.

But you still need to be responsible enough and understand how much you're spending on things on a regular basis.

So there's a balancing act for sure.

But I don't think that you need to be strict and punishing yourself and spending hours and hours budgeting if you have your finances mostly sorted out.

Maybe that's just me justifying my own behavior, though.

I like that.

I like those.

That does seem pretty adaptable.

So each spending and tracking style could kind of fit into each of these.

It sounds like we need an emotional spending category in your budget.

But I can completely relate.

This is my pot of money that I use to process the trauma of the world on a regular basis.

I budget really similarly to you, Elizabeth, actually.

And instead of doing zero based, I like to think of it as like broad based budgeting, where I do pay myself first, where I have my money going into my various savings accounts.