Pocket Money – Experiment Update
By Matt - Friday, December 8th, 2006
Last week I wrote about pocket money and I was trying an experiment that consisted of pulling out a bunch of money and just using it instead of continuously using my debit card. Since pulling out a big wad of money and carrying it around wasn’t what I wanted to do I just pulled out $200 and used that, knowing that I was going to have to pull out more. Overall knowing that the money I had in my wallet was all that I had for expenses such as food, gas, entertainment really made me more conscious of what I was spending my money on.
In essence the experiment worked. But I have to add a caveat to this, I spent more than I was expecting. I think this had to do with the fact that the money was available to some extent; but realistically I think I would have spent the money regardless. I like the idea of just using pocket money and having this as a gauge of how much money you’ve got left this pay for the extraneous expenses. I’m going to continue the pocket money experiment for the rest of the month to see how it pans out.
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This entry is filed under Budgeting and Planning.
3 Responses to “Pocket Money – Experiment Update”
1 Maria says:
December 8th, 2006
at 11:50 am
You spent more than expected because you took out more? I kind of understand your situation. For example, my ATM only allows me to take out money in $20 increments so if I only want $150, I must take out $160, which kind of ruins it. Then I would have to get it broken down, etc… Kind of a quandry!
2 Dan says:
December 8th, 2006
at 4:42 pm
Interesting… I have often thought that if I kept less money in my wallet it would help me use less. But, as it turns out, it ends up just being a hassle. I think spending less is more something that you can accomplish through discipline and sticking to only using x dollars in x days as opposed to limiting your cash. With the availability of ATMs and credit cards and whatever payment methods you can think of, your money is so liquid anyways that limited cash doesn’t always means limited money.
3 Alex - YoungFinances.com says:
December 9th, 2006
at 11:03 am
I tried something similar with my wife and I.
It worked somewhat, but the reason we wound up not liking it was because it made it harder to track our expenses. (OK, I’ll admit, I was the one who didn’t like it — my wife loved that I couldn’t track what she was spending!)
Now we are on a system of using cash for nothing (or as little as humanly possible) because by doing so, all of our expenses are automatically tracked and categorized by Yodlee.
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