My $17 spreadsheet experiment just saved me $140 a month

I got sick of guessing where my paycheck went every single week, so last January I started tracking every coffee, snack, and gas fill-up in a plain Google Sheet. Nothing fancy, just categories and amounts I typed in on my phone before bed. By March I noticed I was spending $42 a month on energy drinks from the gas station near my route, which is insane when I own a perfectly good French press. I swapped that for a $4 bag of ground coffee and started bringing a thermos. Then I saw I was paying $95 for a gym membership I used maybe 4 times, so I canceled it and now do bodyweight stuff at the park near my house in Portland. The weirdest part is that seeing the numbers every day made me hesitate before small purchases in a way I never could with just a budgeting app. Has anyone else found that the act of writing it down manually beats any auto-categorizing tool? I want to know if I'm just weird or if this is a real thing.

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