Which is fine!

Here's what you do: allot a certain amount of cash to discretionary expenses each month. You take that money out at the beginning of each month (actually in my case, twice a month) and then use it. And when you run out you're out.

What you've just done is used physical cash to put a hard ceiling on your discretionary spending. This turns what are normally variable expenses into a fixed item in your budget, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to account for.

Once it's in my wallet, it's already spent by my spouse.

I might actually spend as much as 10% of my cash withdrawals myself. I can reliably keep a single $10 bill in there, as the "didn't want to clean you out"-based guilt prevents the very last note in there from being taken.

Of course, now the spouse just takes the debit card from my wallet instead, so I might have to start keeping more cash in there, in case I go to pay for something one day and it's not there.

It definitely formed a different attitude towards cash then I feel I otherwise would have got. The money I have left in my wallet feels like all I have this month, and as the bills disappear I really feel the spending. I feel spending from my bank account much less.

I think the mentality comes from using your bank's website/mint/etc to track your spending. Anything done with a card becomes a specific line item staring you in the face; cash, however, just falls into "miscellaneous".

It makes you MUCH more conscious of how much things cost because you don't want to get to the checkout and be short.

Yeah I remember that situation. I accidentally left my card at home. I didn't have lunch that day and I barely managed to drive home with an almost empty fuel tank.

To me looking at the balance on my phone is far quicker than counting all the damn coins. 1 cent coins are such a huge annoyance that I'd rather throw them into the trash than actually pay with them.

On the minus side, I use contactless ("wave to pay") all the time now, and find I rarely look to see how much I'm spending on small transactions. Even with larger transactions, it doesn't feel like "real money".

Not only that, I can download a monthly spreadsheet of all my transactions, pivot them into a simple table and so on and so forth. Data out the wazoo. £105 a month on tube fares. £235 a month on lunch. £17 on fuel. Knowing where I spent it is as useful if not more so than how much I spent in total.

Then of course there is the free money I get from spending on a card. It all seems like a no brainer. And I never need to go to an ATM. And most the time I just lean my wallet against a card reader and mosey onwards.

I'm not sold.

Changing the range changes what transactions are summarized, and what transactions are shown in detail below the graph. Clicking a graph category further filters and shows the transactions that match, with the graph changing to more specific sub-categories (rent, water, electricity etc if I click housing).

The categories are set automatically, but can be overridden or a transaction can be divided between several, and that remembered for future transactions.

I'm impressed that a bank produced this system!

I download my transactions weekly from my CC company and can easily see I've been spending way too much money eating out the past two months.

FTFY.

The modern world seems to be one in which business, governments, and hackers know exactly what we are doing.

I like to use cash a lot too. And the privacy benefits are true sometimes, but more and more places want your information when you purchase anything. I bought a weed wacker the other day and they wanted my address and phone and email. I never say no, but instead reply with, "555 Fake Street" which is obnoxious, but its like you don't need my damn address to sell me lawn equipment. Amazingly, most people dont understand why anyone would give false information to a random business.

I'm not sure what I would do if I lived in a city where electronic transactions are a requirement for public transport. I guess I would walk as much as possible... or even move to an alternative place.

    I'm not sure what I would do if I lived in a city
    where electronic transactions are a requirement for
    public transport.