Money Management using the CAP Christians Against Poverty budgeting tool

The British Christians Against Poverty (CAP) has a brilliant online system to help plan a weekly and a monthly budget, and to plan for savings items as well on a monthly basis.

Basically you have three accounts.

Firstly your Salary/DirectDebit account where your income comes in and your fixed monthly expenditure goes out from eg Mortgage, Car Insurance, Electricity etc.

Secondly you have a 'cash' account and the things you buy (using either cash or debit card) are budgeted for and a weekly standing order is set up from the salary account to this cash account, so effectively you get paid weekly.  This is helpful psychologically and it helps overspend when you just get paid as well, as you only get a fixed amount to spend weekly so it 'tames' your desire to spend large on payday which can be a real curse.

Finally there is a savings account for annual items of expenditure eg Christmas, Car Tax, Holiday which you know are coming and so lay aside each month a fixed amount for them also.  This avoids panic nearer the time when the money has to be laid out and again helps to avoid over-spending on pay day because you set up a standing order to transfer a fixed amount monthly from your salary account into this savings account.

That's basically the CAP system and it works like a dream.  The cash element I personally found I am too busy to make cash work but instead I get a free text every morning from my bank so I know my balance and also if I spend money I send myself a text in the bank account stream of texts, so I can always check my spend at any moment.  I did try cash but am just too busy to make it work, plus get most of my items online now anyway and don't actually spend much cash.  But the system CAP recommends is, like you are trying, to go cash.  The system is free and the online budgeter can be updated as your budget changes.  Hope that helps!   https://www.capmoney.org/