Shannon Lee Simmons

The money you can spend is not the fixed expenses like your rent or your mortgage or all that stuff.

It's not your savings going to your long-term retirement accounts or going to debt repayment or paying down the mortgage.

It's not the money that's saving for emergencies or going towards a future vacation.

It's literally everything else.

But that is as far as you need to go as far as setting that limit.

I call it your hard limit.

It is the physical line in the sand between the money you can and can't spend every pay period.

I even go so far to say separate it into a separate checking account.

Because once you know that dollar amount per paycheck, you just drop it in there, blow it to zero on life between now and the next payday.

And as long as that account is a physical representation of what is yours to spend,

Who cares if how it breaks down between miscellaneous shopping and groceries and gas and pants and coffee and kids' birthday party, a personal vendetta of mine.

Who cares?

As long as you're fed and having fun.

What I also think is if we are spending on credit cards, fine, just move the money from that spending account onto it.

So that is always sort of a reflection.

It's sort of like how you can stay within your limit and

without over budgeting, without doing the daily back and forth and the guilt and the shame around the specific categories.

But that's worked for me forever.

It has been, I mean, that book is a bestseller.

It's very powerful.