It’s so easy to swipe your way through your monthly expenses. One traditional method to reset your finances is to leave your plastic at home and stick to cash.
Can you really swear off cards in a world where so much spending happens via automatic recurring payments? Don’t worry about the payments you have set up for your rent, utilities, or insurance. Focus your all-cash month (or cash diet) on your face-to-face transactions:
Switching to cash is important because it increases what’s called the “pain of payment.” When you swipe a card, it doesn’t feel like you’re paying for anything. You’re just shoving a piece of plastic into a machine and receiving an item or service in exchange for that motion.
Using real, tangible cash makes you feel the impact of your spending as soon as you do it. Imagine the dread you’ve felt logging into your credit card account to see how much you spent recently. If you used cold, hard cash, you’ve already spent that money—it’s not on a growing tab for you to deal with later.
By paying with physical cash and feeling that “pain” now instead of later, you can be more proactive in making good financial choices as you go, rather than facing them down the road. Try paying with cash for an entire month, and you may be surprised at how your finances transform during just a few weeks. Pair this method with the envelope system for an extra challenge.