Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

This is Optimal Finance Daily. Can't stick to a budget? Here's the solution. By Jen Hayes of

genhays.me. Most of us have good intentions when it comes to budgeting. We create a spreadsheet, set a

maximum spending amount for each category, and plan to stick to our budgets faithfully.

Then we forget about it.

We might have a general idea of how much we plan to spend in each category, but we swipe our

debit cards all the time without even really thinking about it.

Maybe we log into our bank accounts two weeks later and realize we're way over budget.

Oops!

Personal finance expert, Dave Ramsey, claims that Americans have lost our ability to feel money. Society has made

it far too easy for us to spend money on autopilot. We can go on a shopping spree with just a few

clicks on a computer, pay with a credit card, and forget about it until we get the

bill a month later. Our tendency to swipe cards without tracking what we're doing makes it difficult

to stick to a budget. Dave recommends the cash envelope system for budgeting. What's the cash envelope

system? With this method, you'll have a separate cash envelope

for each category of your budget.

For example, you may have an envelope for eating out,

another for clothes, one for groceries, and so on.

You might put $100 in the eating out envelope,

$50 in the clothes envelope, and $400 in the groceries envelope. Once you run out of cash in the

envelope, you're no longer allowed to spend money in that category. Hit your $100 for eating out

already. No more eating out for the rest of the month. Why it works. The purpose of using cash is to

...