[Ghoulish Delight]

All I'm saying is don't knock it 'till you try it.

I'm good with money, thanks to learning from my parents who are masters. I lived for 8 years on my own without tracking my spending and ended up in a position where I could afford to buy property, so believe me, I know how to do the in-my-head-accounting thing. But buying said property constituted a major shift in my baseline, and getting down on paper exactly how much was going out became a necessity, at least to see it once so I could figure my new mental baseline.

I didn't expect to get much out of it other than a couple bottom line numbers. I was surprised as anyone by how much just seeing the numbers in front of me changed how I thought about spending. With it spelled out in black and white (well, actually, several different colors thanks to Excel), it wasn't even an effort to start increasing the amount of saving I was doing. When I could see in near real-time how much a simple decision like packing lunches or splitting an entree (amazing how much of one's spending flexibility involves food) was affecting the bottom line, those simple decisions that didn't negatively affect my quality of life and yet positively affected my budget bacame very very easy.