Frugality isn’t what it used to be.

Looking back at my bank-account statements from the past few years, I can see that my monthly discretionary spending dropped somewhere between 10 and 15 percent in the five months after I introduced this system. The trends are a bit hard to track with any statistical certainty—spending varies month to month for all sorts of reasons—but I did, in the early days, find myself forgoing certain transactions, for instance, opting more often for a bus over a ride-hailing service.

Perhaps the more definitive success of my system is the fact that, even as I have begun to earn more money, my monthly spending has remained more or less the same—a fact that I attribute in part to the increased clarity of my cash flow. (I also track my weekly spending in spreadsheets, which probably helps too.) Another benefit of keeping a ledger is that it alleviates the credit-card-induced stress of knowing that money will come due but not knowing exactly how much is owed until the bill arrives; in this way, my system adds some short-term pain but alleviates a longer-term discomfort.

Now that I’m almost three years into following this rule, I talked to some personal-finance experts to see what they’d make of it, and if they thought it might work for others. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, was a fan. “Making a list of spending is very useful,” he told me, and said I’d successfully devised a way to increase my pain of paying.

He did, however, mention a few ways that my system could be improved upon. Recording the transaction “after the fact is one thing, but doing it before is probably the right approach,” he said, because then it’d more directly affect the decision to buy something. He noted that a theoretically ideal system would entail logging, say, every item in one’s cart at the grocery store individually, but acknowledged that in practice this would not be ideal.

Against credit cards

Another thing to consider when making spending decisions, Ariely says, is what one could be buying instead with the same money. For instance, he suggested setting up a rule like, I’ll set aside some money each week, and every nonnecessity I buy will come out of that, but at the end of the week I get to spend the remainder on a nice dinner. There’s always a trade-off between buying something now and buying something else later, but making it explicit in this way could help inform purchasing decisions.

But in the end, Ariely’s advice was to just use a debit card. “Credit-card companies, sadly, don’t have the interest to reduce the pain of paying,” he says. (Unfortunately, though, in the U.S., opting out of credit cards entirely presents other serious disadvantages—having good credit tends to increase the likelihood of approval for, and lower rates on, loans.)