I find there area few things the budgets and spreadsheets help with from a personal finance perspective:

- Values vs reality: A $3000 candle budget is fine, but if you're spending $10/work-day on candles it might be easier to see when that accumulates and you can compare it against your longer-term aspirational goals. This is especially true for less tangible expenses like subscriptions where it can be difficult to see "I'm spending $3000/year on candles I never burn" from ground level.

- Planning and decision-making: It's easier to make good life decisions (e.g. "should I take $job" or "can I buy $house") if you have an accurate accounting of your life expenses.

Yeah, before we picked up YNAB more than a decade ago we never had issues with $3k of candles disappearing in the budget, but we still struggled to save money.

When we started using YNAB and entering our spending into it, it was like a hockey-stick diagram on our household net worth.

And this isn't even double-entry accounting (which I've adopted for my own personal spending). One thing I'll say is that the way we use YNAB seems different from most other people: we hand-enter every transaction, we don't import it afterwards from the bank. Then we reconcile what we thought we spent vs. what the bank says we spent.

In this way we have to be a bit more intentional about what we're spending money on since there's not some kind of big monthly exercise to make the numbers line up and then a "we'll try to be better next month". Instead it's more like an envelope system where we are tracking budget categories as the month goes by.

I used to use YNAB and I think this was its whole point: you allocate money in different envelopes (budgets) and as the month goes by, you enter your transactions and see how your envelopes deplete.

I didn't actually do this that much, I was much more interested in where my money was going over longer periods (say a year). It was nice enough, but I dropped it a few years ago when they had big price increase and became more expensive than it was worth to me.

Yeah, I'll probably switch to Actual at some point in the next couple of years as a result of the price change. The YNAB team at least continues to strive to make improvements to the core app so they seem to be actually putting the money to use, but the improvements are not in directions I need. And the improvement I do need, to make their web site faster for 10 years of budget, seems perenially on the back burner.

It's hard to find general truth when it comes to how people keep track of their money.

For a long time, I didn't understand either because I thought everyone was like me always roughly aware of the balances of all their current accounts and with enough reserve that a moderate unplanned event is insignificant but that's not the case.

Some people have a terrible grasp of how much money they currently have. Some work on so tight a budget that even a small deviation triggers a lot of undesirable effets - banks are actually awful for that because they really milk their customers with resource issue.

That's why budgeting is so effective for some people. If your budget is killed by a few overdraft events, just avoiding that will give you a lot of breathing room.

My wife and I have moved all of our personal, individual spending to a dedicated card each. Sure, some stuff still makes it into other cards, but the simplicity makes budgeting so much easier. Even if we only accurate capture 90% of our spending, we close enough to targets that it doesn’t matter.

My general rule is a simple system that works well enough is better than a complex, but precise system.

We build our budget with this slop in mind, so anything left over is bonus.