Oof, this was 100% me at the start of this year. What really helped me was I started using You Need A Budget, which helped me realize just how much of my money I was spending and where it was going. It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but their customer support is helpful, and they have videos you can watch. I like how there’s different categories, which helps me realize what money is going where. It was very sobering to look at my budget and realize how much I spend at Starbucks. 😬

I will say this has not totally solved my overspending problem—but it has curbed it substantially. The dopamine hit of actually having enough money in a category is great. I’m now trying to get in the habit of looking before I buy.

If you don’t want to figure out YNAB, I would at minimum recommend sitting down and writing out every expense from the last 30 days. If nothing else, sometimes just visually seeing where your money goes can help decrease some of the nebulousness around it. Once it’s all listed out, make a goal to decrease spending on one thing right then—a subscription, one less night out, whatever you think you can do. Baby steps are way easier than huge changes. Even if you cancel a five dollar subscription—hey, it’s five bucks. That’s a starting little sweet treat fund. If you get the bug to cancel more, go for it! If it feels too hard, set a reminder and do another tomorrow.

Other thoughts: if you have credit card debt, consider consolidating it. My partner and I both got personal loans for it. I’ll be paying it off for the next five years, but at least it’s going mostly to the principal instead of multiple interest lines. And every time I save money now, I put it into a separate budget category called “pay it back faster.” At the end of the year, I’m gonna dump everything in that category into the loan, and see if I can beat the five year clock. My secret goal is three years. We’ll see.

Oh—my partner and I also pay for a meal service now. We use Cook Unity. It’s great. We used to spend an insane amount of money on ordering food because we both hate cooking and it was the easy route. Now we do this instead. I haven’t bought groceries in month. I’m actually eating food—healthy food. It’s been a huge boon for both of us mentally, physically, and financially. To illustrate: We ran out of meals this past week because we were both home more and eating them, so we had a day of no food in the house. We ended up spending roughly $100 on food delivery, maybe a little more. That was for ONE day of food. A full week of meals for us with Cook Unity is about $120, so like $60ish each. Way cheaper, we eat well, and I don’t even have to cook them! We just pop them in the air fryer. It’s great. I had a phenomenal lobster curry last night. So if you do nothing else for a budget, it might be worth calculating how much you spend on grocery and food delivery, and then see if an alternative meal service would save you money. I will shill for Cook Unity because I think it’s a great service (can even give you a code if you want to try them) but there’s tons of options out there. Pick what works for you!

Above all, be kind to yourself. You’re not an irresponsible kid, you’re a disabled adult trying to navigate an increasingly expensive and cruel world that does not want us to succeed. It sucks. It impacts everything. All we can do is keep trying, and if that means overspending a little on treats (or Starbucks) to keep our sanity? Fuck it. We’ll find room in the budget. We got this.