My $6 spreadsheet subscription made me cancel a $60 app

I used to pay for a fancy budgeting app and still messed up my grocery budget every month. Then my neighbor in Phoenix showed me a simple Google Sheets template with a dropdown for categories and a running total. I set it up in an hour and honestly the free version does everything I need, plus I can see where my money goes without the app's fancy charts. Has anyone else downgraded to something simpler and actually stuck with it longer?

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troy83212h ago

Man, I feel this so hard. I was paying for one of those apps with the pretty graphs and the auto-categorizing, but it kept getting my coffee shop purchases wrong, so my "fun money" was always a mess. Switched to a plain old notebook, like a literal paper one, and I write down every single thing I spend by hand. It takes like two minutes a day, and honestly the act of writing it out makes me think twice about buying stuff I don't need, way more than any alert ever did. My savings account actually grew for the first time in months, which is wild to think about. Sometimes the low-tech stuff just wins because it forces you to be present with your money.