I *strongly* encourage you to pick a budgeting program and stick with it. I say this as someone who comes from perhaps more meager means than most in this thread and I now am in a similar position as you.

I use YNAB but I'm sure any will do. Essentially, I give every dollar a "job", whether that is to be the next car insurance payment 6 months from now or for our vacation fund. I know what money I have and where it's going. I have tracked every single dollar I've spent for about the last 10 years, less some petty cash.

I still have financial insecurity worries that likely stem from my childhood and I doubt they'll ever fully go away (see: people who grew up during the Great Depression), but I can allow myself to spend now and do so confidently.

I think you're right. I've mostly stayed away from budgeting apps. I'm already quite busy with work and parenting two young kids, but it may be the best way to train the mind. Thank you

I have the same problem, I don't track my spending but have money automatically plowed into different investments and am generally frugal. Been looking into money manager ex and home bank as foss softwares. Mint, quicken and ynab are popular but I don't want a cloud solution where I have to pay a subscription fee, I mostly just want transactions with labelled data so I can see where the money goes.

Personally, I realized that I was wasting a lot more in opportunity cost by trying to make all the various non-subscription solutions work for me (and writing my own for awhile), and I'm much happier now paying ynab a yearly pittance instead of spending all that time on something without much actual value to me. (And by switching to a subscription model they've been able to improve the product much more quickly than they were with the classic version.)

I also work a lot and have two young kids. Going through and updating the budget each week or two is one of the main things I do to relax :)

> for our vacation fund.

Well most people with the mentality GP is describing cannot get themselves to do this in first place. not sure if this is a budgeting problem. Ppl save obsessively because they think they might need that money for an unavoidable future expense even though they can't quite tell what that might be.

You don't have to spend the "free to spend" money, and you shouldn't feel bad for not spending it.

Maybe collect the unspent amounts into an "Emergency Fun" fund, so you can dip into it if you have a crisis related to fun (gaming device breaks, see something really cool that you want to have or do, etc)

Good luck with that "Free to Spend" category. It just turned into emergency fund 2.0 for me. One thing that allowed me to spend some money is the idea of diversifying my savings by purchasing assets. Rather than let Emergency fund 2.0 sit in an account as cash burning a hole in my pocket why not buy an asset. This could be an apartment, a collectible, a storage facility, etc. For me this feels like saving and spending at the same time.