Why am I always overdrawn even though I earn enough to live?

Sunday evening, 10:47 PM.

My phone vibrates. I already know what it is. A text from my bank. I hesitate to open it, because I know it's never a good sign.

I open it.

"Authorized overdraft exceeded. Overdraft fees will be applied." Great!!!

My stomach tightens. The shame rises. I tell myself: "I'm bad with money." That I earn too little. That I spend too much. I promise to be careful next month. Just like I promised last month. And the month before. And the month before that. You know the drill.

And yet, I earn enough. My salary covers my rent, my bills, my groceries. I don't do crazy things. No luxury car, no vacation on the other side of the world. So, nothing that justifies this overdraft.

So why?

The real problem: uncertainty, not the amount

The real problem might not be the amount of my expenses. It's that I never know if the purchases I make today won't push me into overdraft.

I look at my balance, I tell myself "I have this much, I can spend this much, okay". Except that this balance has to last until the end of the month. It has to pay the bills that haven't been debited yet. It has to absorb the unexpected that will inevitably happen.

That's where everything gets stuck.

Why I always gave up

Have you ever tried an app, a spreadsheet, a notebook? I have. It lasted two weeks. A month max. Then I gave up. I'm not the only one.

I dug deeper to understand why. I came across a 2024 meta-analysis compiling 71 studies (over 11,000 people in total). The result made me pause: cashless payments can make us spend more. Not a universal law, but a phenomenon that regularly occurs.

Basically: when we pay by card or phone, we see the money leaving less. We tap and it's done. No bill handed over, no coins counted. In another experiment, people willing to pay by card made bids almost twice as high as those who paid in cash.

How are you supposed to keep track of what you've actually spent?

The trap of synced apps

Most budget apps offer automatic synchronization: you connect your bank account, and all transactions appear. Super convenient. But for me, it didn't solve the real problem.

With automatic synchronization, I saw my transactions scroll by, but I did nothing with this information. I looked at the balance, told myself "it should be fine"... but deep down, I wasn't sure. Some research shows that actively recording your expenses can change your behavior. It's not "seeing" the numbers that makes the difference. It's the act of recording them.

Automatic synchronization makes tracking passive. You see the numbers, you look at them, and then you move on. You log out, you forget.

This pit in my stomach is not in my head

This Sunday evening anxiety, I realized I wasn't the only one feeling it. Researchers (Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao, 2013) conducted a famous experiment: they asked people to imagine a repair bill (€300 for some, €3,000 for others).

Those with low means saw their reasoning test scores drop just by imagining the high bill. Not because they were less intelligent. Because the stress of the expense captured all their attention. They call this the "bandwidth tax". The brain becomes like a computer that lags because it has too many tabs open.

Not because we are bad at it. Because the stress itself makes us less capable. And the guilt comes after.

Tracking alone never got me out of there

I was always told: "You need to track your expenses, write everything down, categorize." Yes, but no.

Tracking is looking backward. It's knowing that I overspent after I've already done it. Spending data from South Africa showed that people who set a budget spent less on average than those who didn't. It's not the tracking that does this. It's having a clear limit, a target.

Tracking without a plan is an autopsy. You look at what is dead, and you can't do anything about it.

To change, we all need a target. Not a constatation.

What finally made the difference

The problem isn't knowing where my money went at the end of the month. The problem is knowing how much more I can spend today.

My balance tells me how much I have. It doesn't tell me how much I can spend. What I was missing was a daily benchmark.

There are two types of effort:

• Useless effort: setting up, categorizing, calculating. The kind of stuff that made me give up after two weeks.
• Useful effort: becoming aware of what goes out. That little moment when I record an expense and think "oh yeah, right, I bought that".

I no longer have to calculate. I no longer have to categorize at all costs. I enter my income and fixed expenses, and the app calculates for me what I can reasonably spend. It turns my balance into information I can use every day: "Today, you can spend X euros." Period.

The act of entering my expenses manually is not a punishment. It's a habit that reconnects me. I feel the expense, I validate it, and the app tells me it's ok. I stay in control. And that, that de-stresses me.

What I take away from this

• I am not bad with money. I simply had the wrong benchmark.
• I don't need to look at where my money went. I need to know what I can still spend.
• I don't need to track my expenses. I need to decide on my expenses.