Over the course of a lifetime, your income increases, but so does your expenditure. While the income remains very clear, the expenses become very confusing due to their high number and different purposes. At the end of the year you wonder where all the money has ended up.
Many people then (as I once did) get an app to get control over the expenses. These apps structure all expenses (mostly automatically) in categories. To get control, the next step is to analyze the category expenses and suggest a budget for the categories.
This is the beginning of the regular madness:
- Now I have to check regularly if the expenses are assigned to the right categories.
- Transfers regularly cause trouble in the evaluations.
- The standard categories do not suit me and I have to extend and maintain them or I have to press “my world” into a structure that does not fit.
- Through many different evaluations I have to understand with difficulty what my financial situation is like.
- At the end of the year/month I check if the budgets have fit. If there are discrepancies, I have to do extensive research to find out why a budget was exceeded or undercut and adjust everything again.
- During the course of the year my wishes change and I now have to adjust the budgets of the categories to my wishes.
Finding:
- It is no fun for me to spend a lot of time using budgeting software to get transparency about my expenses and in the end the imaginary budget does not fit to my constantly changing world.
- I feel that I am not free to do with my money what I want to do with it.
Conclusion: This must go better. I want to be free with the use of my money and still keep control over my financial situation without investing a lot of effort in things that I don’t enjoy.
Antibudget 