How to give yourself an entertainment budget that actually survives the month
Nobody Ever Blew the Budget on the Rent
Here is a thing I have noticed after years of doing my own books badly, and then doing them slightly less badly. When money goes missing at the end of a month, it is almost never the big obvious stuff that did it. The rent went out on the first, same as it always does. The car insurance is on a direct debit and has been for about three years now. Those numbers are boring and they behave themselves.
What gets you is the middle. Fifteen quid here, a fiver there, a birthday you completely forgot about, two coffees that somehow turned into lunch, a subscription you meant to cancel back in March. None of it feels like a decision at the time. Then you look at the banking app on the 24th and there is this gap, and you cannot really account for it, and you feel a bit thick about the whole thing. Which you should not, because this happens to more or less everybody I know, including several women who run companies and are very good at it.
So this is not one of those pieces telling you to give things up. I am definitely not going to tell anybody to stop buying coffee. It is about giving the enjoyable part of your life an actual number, so it stops quietly eating the rest of your money while you are not looking.
Work Out What You Are Really Spending First
Before you set any limit, you need to know your starting point, and most of us are quite badly wrong about ours.
Do this. Open your banking app, go back three full months, and pull out everything that was purely for enjoyment. Streaming, cinema, takeaways, the pub, hobby bits, gifts you bought yourself, apps, games, that day out in July. Add it up, divide by three. That is your real number, not the one you would have guessed.
Almost everyone finds it is higher then they expected. That is not a moral failing and there is no need to feel awful about it. The Office for National Statistics publishes family spending figures every year covering what UK households actually put towards recreation and culture, and the totals surprise people every single time they come out. Fun is a real category of life and it costs real money. Pretending otherwise is exactly why budgets fall over.
Give It a Name and a Number
Once you have that average, decide what you want the number to be going forward. Not what a spreadsheet thinks it should be. What you actually want, given everything else that is going on.
Then, and this is the bit that matters, give the money its own name. Fun money. Play money. The Nonsense Fund, if you like. Whatever you call it, it needs to be a category with a hard edge, not a vague sense that you are being careful.
The reason naming works is honestly a bit silly, but it is very effective. Unnamed money is everybody’s money, so it gets spent by whichever version of you is holding the phone at the time. Named money has a job. When the fun money is gone for the month, it is gone, and you have not done anything wrong, you have just used it up. No guilt required. That change in framing on its own holds the potential to save you a couple of hundred pounds a year.
The Subscriptions Are Not Actually the Problem
Everybody starts with subscriptions because they are easy to find and easy to cancel and it feels productive. Do go and do it, obviously. Go through your card statement, spot the two you forgot, kill them, enjoy the little rush.
But be honest, that is usually about twenty quid, and it is not what breaks a budget. Subscriptions are predictable. Predictable things can be planned around.
The spending that wrecks a month is the one off kind. The unplanned night out. The impulse thing at eleven at night. The little top up you make on a game or an app because you are tired and it is only a few pounds and nobody is watching. Those are the ones that never make it into the mental sums, and they are the ones worth putting a fence around.
Put the Limit Somewhere That Is Not Your Willpower
This is the single most useful idea in personal finance and hardly anybody applies it to fun money. Willpower is a rubbish system. It works beautifully on a Tuesday morning and not at all on a Friday night, wich is precisely when the spending happens.
So build the limit into the thing itself, rather then into your own good intentions.
A separate current account or a pot inside your banking app, funded once a month, is the simplest version. When the pot is empty the month’s fun is done. MoneyHelper, wich is the government backed money guidance service, has genuinely good free budgeting tools if you want a hand setting the categories up properly.
The same logic applies to anything you play or spend on through your phone. Prepaid gift cards for the app stores instead of a saved card. A small amount transferred over on payday rather then your debit details sitting in the account waiting for a weak moment.
It is worth saying that the gambling side of this is one of the very few consumer areas where the tools are already built in and legally required. If a night on the slots is part of how you switch off, and for plenty of women it is, then any UK licensed site has to offer you deposit limits, time outs and self exclusion. Swift Casino, for one example, is a UK Gambling Commission licensed mobile casino where you can set a monthly deposit cap in the account settings before you play anything at all. Set it to whatever slice of your fun money you have allocated, and then the decision is made once, calmly, at the start of the month, instead of forty times badly at half past ten on a Saturday.
That is really the whole trick, and it is not about willpower or being sensible. Any mobile casino, mobile game or shopping app is designed to be very easy to spend on, because that is what the design is for. A cap you set in advance is you having a quiet word with your future self while you are still in a reasonable mood.
Two other small things that help. Most mobile casino sites, Swift Casino included, let you play free demo versions of the games, wich is a no cost way to have the same ten minutes of nonsense without touching the pot at all. And whatever you do, never top up to chase a loss. If you want to talk to somebody about any of this, GamCare are free and open all hours.
When the Month Goes Sideways Anyway
It will. Somebody’s hen lands in the same month as a birthday and a leaving lunch, and the whole neat plan goes out the window by the 12th.
The mistake here is not the overspend. The mistake is deciding that the budget has therefore failed, and abandoning the entire thing until next month, wich is a bit like giving up on a diet because you had a biscuit.
Just borrow from next month, write it down, and carry on. A budget you occasionally break is worth about a hundred times more than the perfect one you gave up on in February.
Start Smaller Than You Think
If this all feels like a lot, do one thing this week. Just the three month average. Open the app, add up the fun, divide by three, and look at the number.
You do not have to change anything yet. Most people find that simply knowing the figure shifts their behaviour within a fortnight, without any effort at all, because it is very hard to unsee it once you have seen it.
Then next month, give it a name and a pot. That is genuinely it. Everything else is detail.
