<prompt> Human: TL;DR: I took the red pill and am paying and tracking everything with cash only. Much more insightful and awesome than I expected. Feels good, man.---It was pretty commonplace for me to be broke by the end of the month or a few days beforehand. My loans were getting paid and my contributions towards my 401k 6 match and savings 15 were fine, so I didnt feel bad about it per se. However, using my credit card to fill in these gaps caused problems made me spend beyond my means, which felt good in the moment but at the end of the day made me feel sour.Ive avoided paying cash for things for a while because I felt like I never knew where the money was going. The logic was that using my debit card for everything simplified tracking my life, so I should aim to use my debit card as much as possible and resort to cash only when necessary.After I started getting exposed to this site and associated literature, I realised that I needed to fix things, so I did the following: Ripped up the credit card, but did not cancel the account. Getting the account number was a hassle, but I could use it to pay bills and get points from the payments, Tabulated my monthly expenses and calculated my estimated daily expenditure, Allocated 40 for immediate emergency spending thats usually in my shoes looking to make this 100, Manually tracking and loosely categorising every single transaction using Google Keep; sophisticated, I know, and Transferred that daily amount into the account to which my debit card is linked the night before, then withdrew the funds in the morning and trained myself to only use that cash. If I have to transfer from my holding account to buy or do something, it is very, very likely that Im spending over my means and cannot afford it.Doing this for the last two weeks has been much more liberating than I was expecting. I know exactly where my money is going and know what, where and when I need to cut things. For the first time in a long while, I made it to the end of a pay period without worrying about where the cash is coming from or when Im getting paid next.The best benefit to have come of this was that it had me focus in on my financial goals much more seriously than before. I put together a super nifty table showing how much Ill be paying for each of my student loans until theyre paid off reduced down to less than two years from seven-ish, all of my recurring expenses and my income per month. It also tells me what my daily allowance will look like for the next few months. This is super important because I now know when Ill be able to know: when Ill be ready to start saving for a home 2 years out and a car 2.5 years out, when Ill be ready to start building my investment portfolio to complement by 401k 1.5-3 years out when I can start building my cash savings 2 years outThis is super liberating because while I used to believe in the past that a better time is near, I now know when that better time will be provided that things stay the same. It is also super liberating because I have a map that will tell me exactly what to expect if I get a new job or move, both of which Im thinking of doing.It does have me thinking about what I spend my money on much, much more, which can be a bit of a bummer since I felt less restricted before I started doing this. I ask for deals and compromise ways of saving money all of the time, scour coupon books for anything good and spend a good amount of time looking for deals before I buy anything. I rarely ever did this before. However, Im realizing that that freedom was really a farce and I was just never as responsible as I should have been. Plus, why turn down free money?Sorry for the long post. Ive been feeling really good about these changes and figured that this was the best place for me to lay my thoughts out.Assistant: Good for you for getting your finances in order. This method might work good if youre not disciplined enough to control your spending with credit cards, but you are sacrificing cash back and convenience of credit cards. Human: My self-control with credit cards sucks at the moment, though Im trying to figure out ways of leveraging both. Something something VISA prepaid cards paid with credit cards that I can take out money from that somehow get financed by my bi-weekly spending allowance something something.  <response>: Dont worry about the cash backconvenience of credit cards. While its nice, you know yourself, and if you cant use it responsibly its not worth the risk. The benefits arent significant, and the cost of overburdening yourself can be great.Whats more important is you are still using the cards to pay bills, and therefore are still building credit. My only advice would be to get physical copies of the cards again you can call up the companies and say they were destroyed, which is true. Then just freeze them in a block of ice in your freezer.Theyll still be there if you need access for an emergency or to set up an automatic bill pay later, but so inconvenient to access you wont use them unless you really need it. 