BUDGETING DOESN’T WORK AND ISN’T REAL SO JUST SPEND ALL YOUR MONEY RIGHT NOW. WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE ANYWAY.

Thanks for the title and the endless lulz, Rosa Lyster.

I know this is the headline you’ve been waiting for your whole life, friends. And this is me, Bona Fide Serious Money Person, who is telling you that it’s true. Kinda. Budgeting doesn’t work, and you really are going to die one day.

Here’s how I imagine life goes for people who have a budget.

Me: “IT’S A SUNNY BEAUTIFUL DAY LET’S GO GET ICE CREAMS AND SPEND ALL AFTERNOON CHOREOGRAPHING OUR OWN DANCE MOVES TO THAT 1999 SISQO CLASSIC, ‘THE THONG SONG’ WHEEEEEEE!”

Serious Budgeting Man: “No thank you, madame. I have already depleted my Ice Cream and Fun budget for this month so I shall be returning to my minimalist studio apartment where I shall contemplate the finer points of the country’s fiscal policy and then make some Excel spreadsheets for fun. Good day to you ma’am. I said GOOD DAY.”

Budgeting doesn’t work because you are not the perfectly rational, long-term planning creature you pretend you are. You are a primate with pants on.

Hear me out here. Your brain did not evolve to handle the complexities of living in a city where at any one time there are six billion fun things you could be doing and an endless supply of food you could be eating and Ru Paul’s Drag Race episodes to be watching, except you shouldn’t be doing those things because of some vague hypothetical future where you’ll regret being broke/obese/unemployed. Your brain evolved to help you find berries and have sex with people, not to resist the myriad temptations of modern life.

So really, it’s quite ridiculous to expect that some system where you tell yourself, “okay brain, I’m going to parade a thousand extremely delicious looking marshmallows in front of your face, and you’re just going to resist every single one of them” is a good system. It’s a stupid system. Your brain is stupid and you’ve got to understand it and be kind to it and work within its limitations, not try to fight them.

This is basically your brain.

Ulysses Pacts

Let me tell you a story. There once was this dude named Ulysses who had to sail past this island that was inhabited by bird-ladies called Sirens. But like, insanely sexy bird ladies (stop making that judgey face, let people love who they love). He knew that when he sailed past their island, they would seduce him with their sexy bird-song music. I imagine a cross between Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical” and Sisqo.

Irresistible, right?

Except that their sexy music was actually just a ploy to lure them to their island, where the ship would smash up against the rocks and their skeletons would join the endless piles of death that surrounded them. Not so hot.

So did Ulysses just sit there, and promise himself he’d be reeeeeal good and resist the sex-song of those sirens? NO SIR! Ulysses understood that he was a dumbass primate and that Future Ulysses could not be trusted. He convinced his sailors to stuff wax in their ears, and had them tie him to the mast of his ship as they sailed by.

Instead of a budget, what you need is wax and some rope. Or, the money equivalent of wax and some rope.

Forget budgeting, try envelopes

Here’s what I need you to do.

• Install some app that tracks where your money actually goes. I like 22seven (but I used to work there, so I’m biased).
• Live your life as normal for a month or two, while it tracks your spending and categorises it for you automagically in the background.
• On your next payday, take 10% of your money and dump it into a savings account (another 10%, if you already save, you impressive grownup you).
• Work out how much money you can safely afford to spend this month, excluding all your very important grownup bills. This is easy to work out now, because you have the data from your cool app and you didn’t even need to do any work. This amount is your FUCKAROUND MONEY.
• Go to an ATM.
• Draw that amount of money as cold, hard cash.
• Go home, spread that cash on your bed and roll around on it a bit. You’ve always wanted to.
• Divide your cash into 4 piles. Hide 3 of them from yourself. Put the last pile in your wallet. This is your Fuckaround Money for the week.

Hide that cash. Hide it good.

Here’s the beauty of this goddamn simple system: you can now just enjoy fucking around with that money. You have permission to spend it. In fact, thinking up fun ways to spend it should be your mission! Here are some ideas.

• Buy candyfloss for everyone at your local park.
• Go to a toy store and buy yourself the giant tub of Lego you always wanted as a kid.
• Send an anonymous donation to a charity.
• Take out a full-page ad in a magazine, and send them your best friend’s most embarrassing high school photo to print.
• Buy some boardgames and go play Cluedo with the people at the nearest old age home.
• Buy a dress made entirely of sequins and take yourself out for a fancy dinner at the KFC.
• Buy your mom the largest bouquet of flowers you can find.
• Hire a singagram company and send them to your enemy’s office and get them to sing Sisqo’s ‘Thong Song’ to them in the middle of a work day.

And you should probably occasionally buy groceries or petrol or clothes or something. But whatever you spend it on, you don’t need to feel guilty about it, because all of your Responsible Grownup Money is safely tucked away in your bank account. You can enjoy spending this money because that’s what it’s for.

There is only one very important rule that makes this system work: when you are out of Fuckaround Money, you are out of Fuckaround Money. If this means you need to survive off the last tin of pilchards at the back of your cupboard for three days, then so be it. You’ll never be broke for more than 7 days at a time, with this system, so just put on your big girl panties and deal with it.

With cash, it’s never hard to see exactly how much money you have left. And spending cash feels a lot more real to our dumbass monkey brains than swiping a card does, so you’re not likely to lose track.

“Do not save what is left after spending. Spend what is left after saving.” — Warren Buffet

Even Warren Buffet likes this approach to money. And Warren Buffet is way more grownup than you are.

So stop feeling so guilty about the fact that you can’t stick to a budget. Be nicer to your brain. Give it some help. Tie it to a mast and stick wax in its ears.

I’m writing a book called How to Manage Your Money Like a Fucking Grownup which Jonathan Ball is very sweetly going to publish in 2018. If there are any questions you want me to answer for you in that book, let me know in the comments. Kloveyoubye.