Of Americans who keep a monthly budget, 84% say they exceed it. That’s from a 2023 NerdWallet survey. Which means most of the people who download a budgeting app, link their accounts, and review the dashboard every Sunday are still overspending. The app hasn’t saved them. It hasn’t even slowed them down.
If you’ve used a budgeting app, you know the drill. You sign up with the best of intentions. You set caps for groceries, dining, rideshares. A red bar appears. You re-categorize wrong transactions. A yellow warning pops up on your phone. You're running low. You feel the pressure rising again. You promise yourself you’ll try harder next month. Or after the trip. Or after the holidays.
Every overage is labeled, color-coded, and graphed against last month’s bar. You close the app. You feel worse than before you opened it.
Then the credit card statement comes. You knew you'd be over in almost every category. The app tells you where. $87 more on groceries than you thought you needed. $41 over on dining out. A rideshare amount that was categorized as transportation when it was ordering food. Every overage is labeled, color-coded, and graphed against last month’s bar. You close the app. You feel worse than before you opened it.
That’s the loop. Categorize. Review. Regret. Repeat. Each cycle asks a little more of you. More vigilance. More willpower. More tracking. So much extra work. So little payoff. If you don't stay on it 100%, the whole budget falls apart.
Here’s the reality. A budgeting app, for all its design polish, is looking backward. It sorts what already happened. It labels what already cleared. It tells you what you spent, which is already in the past. No amount of careful labeling changes an outcome that was decided days ago, when the swipe went through. [CROSS-LINK: Overspending isn't the problem. Mistiming is.]
The budget built on last month's data is a budget that didn’t quite happen the way you think it did.
And when you plan the next month, the app hands you last month as your reference. Researchers Jennifer Peetz and Roger Buehler have shown that people systematically underestimate their future spending when they project it from their past spending, because the past feels tidier in memory than it was. The one-off dinner. The birthday gift. The surprise medical copay. The budget built on last month's data is a budget that didn’t quite happen the way you think it did.
Step back and the bigger picture emerges. Budgeting apps are trying to retroactively solve a problem the banks created in the first place. Each transaction is a standalone event, disconnected from what came before or what’s coming next. Your checking account shows a balance that doesn’t know what bill is coming next week. [CROSS-LINK: The lie of the bank balance.] Any connection between your bank and budgeting app is brittle.
Which leaves the work with you. Every paycheck. Every week. Every decision. It's a lot.
You think: "Wouldn't it be easier to put everything on a credit card, so I can conveniently pay one monthly bill?" But now more than half your paycheck pays for the past. You're trapped in a credit card loop you can't escape.
Your credit card doesn't care if you earn enough to pay it off in full. In fact, they hope you don't. Nearly half of U.S. cardholders—46%—carried a balance last year. The average debt among those carrying one is around $7,300, at an APR averaging 21.5%. In one MIT experiment, people were willing to pay up to twice as much for the same item when paying with a credit card instead of cash. Paying for everything from a credit card balance instead of your banking balance makes your budget even harder to follow, because you're not immediately parting with cash.
You’re feeling the guilt because you have the wrong tool for the job, and it has nothing to do with your lack of discipline.
The budgeting app is just a report card that always seems to show a failing grade.
You’re feeling the guilt because you have the wrong tool for the job, and it has nothing to do with your lack of discipline.
Let’s drop the guilt and picture something better. A system where every need your money is promised to has its own protected place. Where money gets there first, before any want reaches it. Where the arithmetic you’ve been doing in your head—remembering what’s coming, trying not to miss—isn’t yours alone anymore. Where a budgeting app isn’t required.
And the exhaustion you’ve been feeling was the tool pointing in the wrong direction, never a verdict on your character.
Sources.
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NerdWallet. (2023). Most Americans have a monthly budget, but many still overspend. Survey conducted online by The Harris Poll, March 31–April 4, 2023, among 2,000+ U.S. adults. nerdwallet.com — 2023 budgeting report
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Peetz, J., & Buehler, R. (2009). Is there a budget fallacy? The role of savings goals in the prediction of personal spending. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(12), 1579–1591. doi.org/10.1177/0146167209345160
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Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Household Debt and Credit Report
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Federal Reserve Board — Consumer Credit G.19 (current release)
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Prelec, D., & Simester, D. (2001). Always leave home without it: A further investigation of the credit-card effect on willingness to pay. Marketing Letters, 12(1), 5–12. doi.org/10.1023/A:1008196717017
