Live on the account

The cards are away and the balance is falling. This chapter is about the money you spend, which is now the money in your current account, and about making that a month you can live in.

Spend what's in it. That's the whole rule. The account balance is the number you look at now, instead of the green one, and when it's low, spending stops, the way it does for people without a gap. This is uncomfortable for two months and ordinary by the sixth.

Watch where the thinness is. The fortnight in chapter 19 will have shown you where the month runs out. That's the spending the card was covering, and some of it will turn out to be the month and some of it the gap. The gap spending, the coat on the twentieth and the meal on the twenty-fifth, is the part that stops on its own once the account is what's paying, because the account makes it feel like spending.

Cash for the evening. An earlier book in this series, about spending to keep up, suggests taking the evening's money out in cash for a month and paying with that, so that the split and the round register. The same works here for anything that used to go on the card without registering. Cash is the tightest coupling Prelec and Loewenstein described, and a month of it recalibrates what a hundred pounds feels like.

The cushion. Once the dearest card is clear and the fixed amount has moved to the next, take a small slice of it, twenty or thirty pounds a month, and send it to a separate account that isn't a card. This is the earlier book's cushion, and it's chapter 8's emergency fund, the one the card pretended to be. Two or three hundred pounds in it changes how the boiler feels, and it's built from money that used to be interest.

No new credit while the sheet has a balance on it. Not a new card, not a store card, not buy now pay later. Chapter 23 has a word on those. Every new line of credit is a new gap, and the gap is what got spent.

Expect the month to feel small and then normal. The first month without the gap is a month with an edge on the end of it. By the third you'll know the shape of it. By the sixth it'll be your month, with a falling balance on the fridge and a date on it, and the green number in the app will have become a thing you don't look at, because the number you look at is the one in the account, and it's yours.