Copilot Money vs. Mint

While I was always a Mint purist (“And if it doesn’t work for you, you’re just not trying hard enough!” I’d say when people would tell me it just wasn’t working), the more my recommendation was met with hesitancy, the more I felt compelled to find a solution for budgeting that would do for spending what Betterment did for investing. I was on the hunt.

My friend Richard is a quintessential Silicon Valley tech buff (a 2x start-up founder, no less), and when I told him about Money with Katie, the first thing he said was: “Cool! Have you ever heard about Copilot? All my friends love it. The UI is fantastic—one of the founders was a software engineer at Google.”

I downloaded it so quickly, my App Store almost crashed. Then I saw it: the price.

“Aw, man. This costs money? Shit. Never mind.”

But I noticed the demo mode, and it was enough to pique my interest. I played around with the dummy data and immediately felt envious. Then, a few months passed, and curiosity finally got the best of me. I didn’t want Copilot Money to be the one that got away.

Now, five years later, I’m especially glad I didn’t let my cheapness get the best of me. Not to brag, but I’ve categorized 7,121 transactions (more on that below) since I began using Copilot Money in 2020:

And, as longtime budget freaks will know, Intuit shuttered Mint at the end of 2023.

How to budget, generally

While it may be obvious, I want to make sure we’re on the same page here: I don’t use the budgeting app to decide what my budget should be (though Copilot Money will analyze your spending and give you accurate estimates for each category, including recommendations about how you should reallocate funds based on your actual behavior).

I used my Wealth Planner to make my spending and investing plan for the year, and then simply create identical groups and subcategories in Copilot Money so the app will automatically track my every transaction. (Doing this manually would be nightmarish, as I have a metric shit-ton of credit cards and accounts, as pictured below.)

You could definitely create and manage your budget all in one place using Copilot Money, but I like to have my own records as well. At the end of the month, I record the category totals in my Wealth Planner for accountability and record-keeping. The Wealth Planner is built to give you end-of-month and end-of-year summaries, because data is sexy and makes you rich. Obviously.

The system, when working together, might look something like this. On the left, you’ll see my high-level goals for food spending in my big financial plan in the Wealth Planner, and on the right, you’ll see every restaurant transaction being captured.

A Quick Guide to Copilot Money Transactions

The software is very smart and can generally tell with ease what a transaction is—whether it’s a regular expense, income, an internal transfer (like when your checking account pays off your credit card bill; that’s money that’s already been accounted for as ‘spent’ by the credit card transactions), or a recurring bill.

• “T” — If you see a little “T” inside a square next to the transaction, that was an “Internal Transfer.” You moved money from one account to another.
• “I” — Income. This is interest earned, income earned, or else other money that came in that the software recognizes as net-new.
• “R” — Recurring bill (more on how to set those up below).

You can also Exclude purchases from being counted, which I do with business expenses. (Just tap the transaction itself, which will open a little drawer where you can see details—tap the Category, and on the far left, you’ll see “Exclude” as an option. If you choose that, it’ll vanish. If only actual spending were that easy.)

How to Set Up Your Copilot Money App

I had heard Copilot Money was really “smart”; that it was a budgeting app that understood real life.

But I have to admit, when I first started syncing all of my accounts (which, by the way, were all available in the app with the exception of my obscure HSA fund), I was a little overwhelmed. Months of unrefined data poured in, and I had a brief moment of panic: As someone who checked, categorized, and combed through her Mint data multiple times a day, seeing the last year of my life begin to populate willy-nilly in the app freaked me out and I almost aborted the mission.

I’m so glad I didn’t.

The first thing that I had to do (after syncing my accounts) was begin correcting or approving Copilot’s estimates. Most of them were freakishly spot-on, but some of them required additional tweaking on my part. I noticed that normally happened for categories where I paid for something and then got reimbursed for someone else’s half (think utilities, groceries, rent, etc.). The estimate would guess double my actual out-of-pocket cost because the transactions themselves were twice as big.

Because I had already built my overall spending plan into my Wealth Planner, setting it up in Copilot was as easy as adding new spending Categories (and grouping them). Here’s what some of mine look like now after many iterations, as of December 2025:

Copilot Money’s Venmo Integration

The good news? If you’re someone who gets reimbursed via apps like Venmo a lot, you can connect your Venmo account so transaction names and amounts will populate like they would in any other account. (Here are some FAQs about how the Venmo integration works; the TL;DR is that you set up email forwarding for Venmo receipts within the Copilot app and that’s how it pulls the data in.)

Recurring Transactions

Another nice feature is “Recurring Transactions,” which analyzes your data to determine (a) what your recurring charges are and (b) when they happen. Then, it builds it into your spending already at the beginning of the month as if the money has already been spent—that way you don’t go on your merry way through your month thinking you’re hella under-budget only to be surprised by your $160 electric bill on the 21st and blow your own lead.

While setting the actual budget amounts and making sure all the Recurring charges took a little time (probably about half an hour), I’ve been really impressed at how easy it’s been to keep up with and how little ongoing effort it takes. Each Recurring Transaction gets marked with a little “R” in the app. The only Recurring Transaction I use currently is for my rent payment, which happens on the 1st of the month:

Something silly that I’ll admit I loved about Copilot Money: Personalization

You can change category names, colors, and emojis really easily. And while it’s silly to admit, I really liked that aspect of the personalization. Everything works the way you expect it to: Want to change something? Just tap it. Options pop up. It’s not hard to operate, which is crucial for an app that facilitates something as painful for some as budgeting. There’s a level of whimsy to the product and nice haptic feedback (when you tap something, you get a gentle jolt of recognition) that makes regular use of this app a joy.

After You’ve Set Up Your Copilot Money App

Understanding the Tabs You Swipe Between

I quickly got to know the major sections of the app because they make really good use of all the real estate. You can move them around based on what you use most often, and my lineup is currently:

• Cash flow, where you’ll see your net income for the year (super addictive to check, if you’re a psycho like me), which you can easily compare to years prior
• Dashboard, which I’d consider the homebase, where you can see a visual for your spending month-to-date, your budget overview (overages are highlighted here), upcoming recurring payments, and income to date — this is where all new transactions that need to be reviewed will appear, so you’ll probably spend most of your time there
• Categories, which is where your budget categories are listed and the “Spent” amount is tracked against the budgeted amount
• Accounts, where you’ll see all your synced accounts and your assets and debt — this is also where you’ll see your net worth at a bird’s eye view
• Investments, where you’ll see your investment holdings by ticker — the cool thing about the “holdings” section of the Investments tab is that if you own the same security across five accounts, it’ll aggregate your total equity here (pictured below)
• Transactions, where it tracks each and every transaction in a simple ledger
• Recurrings, which we’ve already discussed
• Goals, which is actually a feature I haven’t personally used much because my savings goals are automated in my Wealth Planner and I don’t really think about them anymore

And because you pay for Copilot Money, they don’t have to advertise to you—so every section of their app is actually useful and “real,” with no noise from sponsors or ads.

How to Use Copilot Money in an Ongoing Way: iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, and Web

I might be a unique case study since I f***ing love tracking my spending, but I use Copilot like it’s Instagram now. I’m in that shit constantly. I checked my screen time report, and it’s consistently clocking in as one of my top 5. What can I say? I told you I liked data!

When you open the app, it pulls up the dashboard and highlights transactions that have happened since you last logged in, organized by day. You can click “Mark as Reviewed” to let the app know you’ve signed off on them. It’s pretty slick. I’d guess that about 20% of the time, I have to recategorize the transaction, but that takes all of 8 seconds to click the category and select a new one.

Copilot Money is available on…

• iPhone (where I use it most)
• iPad
• Mac (if I’m sitting down to update my Wealth Planner at the end of the month, I’ll usually use the desktop app since it’s bigger and you can see more at once)
• And, recently, web!

That’s something I appreciate about their team: They push new features thoughtfully, and when I get a notification something new is coming, I know they’re going to overdeliver.

Smart-Rebalancing of Your Budget: Why Copilot Money is Good for Beginners & People New to Budgeting

Let’s say you’re relatively new to the magical world of personal finance and you’re still getting your arms around what your typical spending looks like. The Rebalancing feature essentially uses your actual behavior to determine the most optimal way to shift your budgets, but without changing the total amount spent. It reallocates the dollars to the categories where you’re actually spending money, which improves accuracy over time.

To have Copilot Money rebalance for you, just tap the little magic wand icon in the lower righthand corner of the “Categories” tab, and you’ll see what it suggests based on your spending that month:

Notifications

I’m a freak about notifications most of the time (I turn most of them off), but with banking apps, I’m really paranoid ever since my identity was stolen in 2019. Copilot’s notifications will alert you to any suspected fraud activity right away. I went ahead and gave them full permission to send me whatever they wanted. Blow me up, Copilot. Give me your worst.

It was a “green checkmark” spree as I went through my notifications settings, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how respectful the notifications are—I actually don’t feel like I’m getting blown up at all. I tried to go back in my Notification Center to screenshot a sampling, and there weren’t any there…because I’ve clicked on every single one. Clearly, even in the fugue state in which I typically use my phone, I’m entranced enough with the notifications that I engage with them.

Usually, they pertain to spending updates, categorizing new transactions, or letting you know you got #paid.

Is Copilot Money Worth the Cost?

All right, people. Back to the elephant in the room. The original reason I was almost #out on Copilot Money was because it costs money. It’s $13 per month (or, as college Katie would say, two burrito bowls) if you subscribe monthly, or $7.92 per month if you subscribe for the year upfront.

Because I’m a #moneyblogger, I decided upfront it was market research (and therefore a #BusinessExpense! Thanks, IRS). But after using it, I wholeheartedly believe it’s worth the expense, especially if it finally gets you to interact with your spending and track your budgets on a regular basis.

Try Copilot Money for free—use the code KATIE2M at checkout to extend your free trial to two full months, so you can take it for a true test run, free of charge.

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Copilot Money has been a sponsor of the Money with Katie newsletter in the past. They had no input in this particular blog post or the opinions expressed herein.

The impetus was the realization that my financial life was becoming increasingly complex. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the wheels that were turning in the background, and I wanted to illustrate how money was flowing through the system.

At the time, I had four (sometimes unpredictable) sources of income, a maximum 401(k) contribution, and a lack of a true “emergency fund” savings account, thanks to a taxable brokerage account product from Betterment called a “Safety Net” that I used instead.

To help make my holistic financial picture a bit clearer, I envisioned a visual exercise to put it all to paper. Out came the colored highlighters, and on came the lightbulb above my head. 

I give you: The “money mapping” exercise. If your financial situation is complicated to the point that it becomes hard to keep up with (like how mine was), it’s worthwhile to take the time to streamline the way your money flows through your financial system. Here’s how to make your own, where the name of the game here is simplification. 

My 2025 Update

I didn’t re-draw my old system, but things have gotten progressively simpler despite adding another whole human to the mix in 2021 (hi, Thomas). We now have:

• Two sources of income (100%)

• …that first pay taxes (subtracts 23%)

• …and funds my 401(k) and HSA, and Thomas’s TSP (the 401(k)-style account that military members have) (subtracts another 10%)

• …then the rest flows into our joint checking account (the remaining 67%)

• …which pays our rent and our four primary credit cards each month (my business card, my AmEx Platinum, my AmEx Gold, and Thomas’s Chase Sapphire Preferred) (call it somewhere in the 22% of total ballpark)

• …and then funds our joint taxable brokerage account with what’s left (around 45% of total ballpark)

See? It’s way more fun with highlighters.

Start with income:

Sometimes we introduce more complexity slowly over time as our financial lives morph and grow around our habits. You know how it is: You start paying rent out of one specific checking account because it just so happens to be the one set up for withdrawals. Then, you open a new checking or savings account elsewhere, but still need to funnel money back to the old one to pay the rent, and, and, AND…it slowly becomes an unwieldy mess.

Of course, some people like to maintain a bunch of accounts for different things, but I’ve found personally that that becomes an unnecessary energy drain.

So, you’ll start by drawing the cash flowing from your income stream(s) into your central checking account (or accounts, if you maintain joint finances with someone in a “yours, mine, and ours” fashion).

The 401(k) contribution (or 403(b), or HSA, or…you get the picture) has to come directly from the paycheck, too, and that’s great—so make sure you’re demonstrating that on your money map somewhere. 

Illustrate your emergency fund: 

If you’re still growing your emergency fund, draw a dotted line from checking to savings to represent your monthly flow of cash. If your emergency savings are already funded, set it off to the side to visualize its “reserve” status—like an account waiting in the wings.

It’s there if you need it, but you aren’t actively funneling money into it. If you have a habit of “over”-saving (and therefore “under”-investing), this mental separation can help you see where it might be more helpful to reroute extra funds to a more growth-y destination. 

You may also have other savings or investing goals that you’re actively funding—like for a house down payment or future childcare—so you can draw those little metaphoric buckets as well.

Add in spending:

Most of my spending—necessary and discretionary—happens on credit cards, which I pay for out of the checking account. There are a ton of reasons to use credit instead of debit cards: security against fraud risk, cash back, points…the list goes on. 

But sometimes you have to pay something with a direct withdrawal (like my rent). I like to note that in my map where it makes sense.

You can think about the credit card as the first line of defense, or barrier, between your spending habits and your checking account. While you shouldn’t find yourself in a position where you need to be actively transferring money into checking from savings to pay your credit cards, I like to know when there’s a big-ticket item that’s going to be taken directly out of checking instead of funneled through a credit card with a “delayed” due date.

Draw post-tax investment accounts as offshoots from the checking account:

When you open a post-tax investing account like a Roth IRA or a regular taxable account, you have to deposit money directly into those accounts from checking or savings. Remembering to do this on an ongoing basis as you earn every month can be tedious, so I like to set up bimonthly auto-transfers that happen in the days following when I get paid (though in recent years as my income has become increasingly variable, I tend to manually check at the end of every month and make manual transfers, too).

What about taxes?

There’s a big missing piece of the visual puzzle above. Can you spot it? Taxes. Taxes will also be paid directly from your paychecks, so if you want to note it, you can (I did in my update above, just to twist the IRS knife). I recently sat down with a spreadsheet and listed our income, spending, and total tax burden, and was shocked at the pie chart that got spit out: We’ve paid more in taxes this year than we’ve spent on everything else combined.

That made me realize it probably makes sense to hire an accountant to double-check our tax strategy, vs. stressing about an incremental few hundred bucks spent here or there. (It also reminded me that now’s the time to invest in the business via #WRITEOFFS if anything comes to mind.)

Creating a sense of scale

You’ll also probably notice the percentages on the flow chart above. If I were really on my visual representation high horse, I would’ve drawn the boxes to scale (and actually, I low-key love that idea), but for the sake of my less-than-artistic first rendering, I just noted the percentages where applicable.

But drawing the boxes to scale can be helpful because it’ll help you see if you’re prioritizing investing (and doing so in an ideal way), or if there are a lot of leaky holes in your budget. For example, if only tiny offshoots are being sent to investment accounts or savings and the vast majority of your income is going right out the door in that spending bucket, it can help make your purchasing decisions a little more tangible.

It might also help you see where you’re prioritizing certain financial goals a lot more heavily than others—perhaps in a way you hadn’t realized. 

Why money mapping is a useful exercise

Besides the fact that you can whip out the highlighters and touch real paper for the first time in months, money mapping helps you diagnose large trends in your financial life.

It can also help reveal gaps in your own understanding. If you start filling in numbers and realize that you don’t actually know where part of your income is going every month, it can help visually guide you toward possible solutions.

For example, when I saw that 57% of my investing was going into a taxable investing account, it made me wonder if there were other tax-advantaged options I could—*ahem*—take advantage of first besides my 401(k) and Roth IRA. (Spoiler alert: I ended up contributing more to my HSA and opening a Solo 401(k) for my self-employment income.)

Happy mapping, nerds!

It wasn’t until I found myself in a peculiar economic position that a more helpful version of this rule emerged for me: Don’t live beyond your assets.

Once I found myself graduating from a median income to a higher one, I straddled the line between two worlds: Do I maintain my exact same lifestyle and invest everything extra, or do I recognize that I can afford a little lifestyle creep?

The hard part? There’s no rule of thumb for how to handle such a situation. I felt silly skimping on brand name orange juice, but I was also terrified of backsliding into the old, spend-y habits that used to drain my checking account every month.

Just because I was making more money didn’t mean I was wealthy, and I struggled to find balance.

When I made $50,000/year, these decisions were paradoxically easier: I didn’t have a ton of extra cash every month. I spent what I spent, saved what I saved, and the whole ordeal involved less than $3,100 per month of total inflows and outflows.

But what if you suddenly find yourself making 3x that? 5x? 10x? (Hey, dream big!)

Some suggest keeping your savings rate the same as you earn more (increasing the amount you’re saving proportionally with your income), but that introduces a new quandary: Your target is technically getting further away, and your financial independence date doesn’t actually get any closer despite your income rising.

If only there were a reliable metric we could add to the equation to help guide our decision…

Fortunately, there is: Your net worth.

Your income might look as though it justifies your spending—but would your net worth?

The big question mark for me was this: Sure, I have more disposable income now that could feasibly fund a more lavish lifestyle. But if you looked in my investment accounts—my larger financial picture—would my spending behavior still seem reasonable and justified?

An example

Let’s pretend I’m a beautiful 23-year-old TikTok star who suddenly found myself earning $400,000 per year thanks to lucrative brand deals and a sparkly personality. I’m making great money, no?! I’ve had my eye on the Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon for a while, a $140,000 car. Could I make the case for affording that vehicle, given my income? Well, I suppose so—it’s roughly ⅓ of what I earn in a year, right? That’s not too outrageous. 

But wait—my liquid net worth is only $50,000. Now does it make sense for me to buy a car that’s worth nearly 3x my entire life savings? Almost certainly not. 

By marrying these two metrics—our liquid net worth and our income—we can strike a better balance around the type of lifestyle that’s reasonable to live, as opposed to just looking at one number or the other. While income is the number most people use to determine what they can spend, it only tells half the story.

Here’s where I landed (and I’ll share how I formulated this below): Your reasonable annual spend is the average of 4% of your current invested assets—inspired by the 4% Rule—and your income.

For example, someone who has a net worth of $250,000 and an income of $250,000 (let’s pretend that’s after tax, for simplicity’s sake) would net the following annual spending that’s beneath both their income means and net worth means:

4% of your net worth: $250,000 * 4% = $10,000
Post-tax income: $250,000
$10,000 + $250,000 = $260,000

$260,000 / 2 = $130,000

In this example, someone who makes $250,000 per year and is worth $250,000 would find a reasonable “below their means” annual spend of $130,000 maximum. This allows them to enjoy their higher income without meaningfully disrupting their progress toward financial independence.

(Note: I’m using “post-tax” a little colloquially here; if you’re also tossing a giant chunk of money every month into something like a 401(k), HSA, 403(b), or other account sponsored by your noble corporate benefactor, don’t forget to include that in your income, too—it’s still your income, you’re just opting to save it before you see it like the wise Rich Girl you are.)

Here’s a table that takes incomes between $50,000 and $500,000 and net worths between $50,000 and $1,000,000 into account (our example is shaded in green).

How I came up with this part-art, part-science formula

The “4% of net worth” figure serves as a bit of an anchor: It reminds you of the type of spending that your current invested assets can support (thanks to the 4% rule), which can lend some perspective to how much progress you’ve already made and how far you have to go.

As you’ll see in the table, even someone who’s worth $1 million and earns $250,000 should spend no more than $145,000 per year—because while it sounds like a lot of money (in both cases, because it is!), the proportionality of financial progress means they’d need roughly $3.7 million invested to support their spending if they were to lose their income (rendering a net worth of $1 million still quite far from their goal). 

This formula keeps a tight leash on lifestyle inflation by grounding it in the reality of one’s net worth—never allowing the runaway freight train of luxury cars and Uber Eats (guilty) to derail one’s progress completely.

On the flip side of the equation, if someone found themselves on the opposite side of the income spectrum but with similar moolah in the bank—$50,000 income and $1 million net worth—you’ll notice that the recommendation is to spend nearly everything they’re earning, because they’re so close to financial independence so as to not need to be saving much more.

Widening the aperture in this way allows you to give weight to what’s arguably the more meaningful, permanent variable in your financial life—your net worth—as opposed to basing 100% of your spending decisions on your current, subject-to-change income. This guideline should also help high earners on their way to financial independence understand just how much they can indulge with their incomes—without going overboard.

This post will probably feel a little counterintuitive given the fact that I constantly promote earning as much as humanly possible, so let’s get one thing absolutely clear upfront:

Earning more will skyrocket your investing journey to eventual freedom, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to spend less.

I won’t waste time explaining the painfully obvious (“If you spend every dollar you’re making, it doesn’t matter how much you’re making,” #duh), but I do want to dig into why a dollar saved is worth more than a dollar earned.

How often do we scheme for new ways to make money? We fight for raises, politick around the office for promotions, and (if you’re like me) are constantly scanning for new and inventive ways to make money that are (mostly) legal and don’t require a ton of extra effort.

But if you’re on this #financialfreedom journey with me, there’s a part of this puzzle that makes way more sense to focus on in the beginning:

Spending less.

Spending less matters more than earning more. Without question.

Why?

Because a dollar of new earned income is taxed, and a dollar you already have in your pocket isn’t.

Huh?

Think about it this way: In order to have one dollar in your pocket, you actually had to earn closer to $1.30: Between federal income tax, state income tax, and Medicare/social security, you’re probably paying about 30 cents of every dollar you earn to your friends at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

So once you actually have a dollar, the equation looks like this:

$1 of money in your pocket requires working for $1.30 to replace it.

I’m no currency exchange expert, but that fact – that you have to earn $1.30 to actually pocket a dollar – means that dollar in your possession is inherently more valuable than $1 of earnings.

If you’re like, 30 cents? Big whoop – what’s this crazy internet girl even talking about?

Consider this:

Most of us would get excited about a 10% raise. If you make $50,000 and you get a 10% raise, your new income is $55,000 – yeehaw, cowgirl!

So you might look at that and think, “Sweet, five-thousand bucks!”

But how much of that will you actually see, on a monthly basis?

$5,000 / 12 months = $416 per month before tax, or approximately $291 after taxes (if you assume averages for state, federal, and other taxes).

Isn’t it weird to think that a 10%, $5,000 raise equates to just $291 more per month? That’s less than $150 extra per paycheck.

To actually take home an extra $5,000 per year, you’d need to get a raise worth $7,150.

When you think about it that way, it means that saving $5,000 of your income per year is equivalent to giving yourself a $7,150 raise.

I know this feels like fancy bullshit accounting, but it’s true: The good news is that often times saving extra money is actually easier than clawing your way up a corporate ladder to earn more. We won’t even meander into the land of lifestyle creep today (wherein you slowly begin spending more as you make more, therefore eliminating any margin or gap between expenses and income despite the fact your income is growing), but the classic Corporate America trap is being placated every few years by a few percentage points tacked onto your salary without realizing you aren’t really getting ahead.

I’m not saying getting raises is a bad thing – just that if you’re spending as if you’re about to be on season 26 of the Bachelor and need a new outfit for every group date, even a $5,000 raise won’t help.

Do you think it’d be easier to shave $416 per month off your expenses, or negotiate a $7,150 raise?

They have the exact same impact on your bottom line.

Trying to earn more without getting control of your spending is like fighting to put more water in a bucket that has holes in the bottom.

Until you patch up the holes (read: the spending leaks), it doesn’t matter how hard you work to fill that bucket with water – it’s utterly futile. Your effort is wasted. Your time is wasted.

Unchecked, unintentional spending can suck the wind out of the sails of even the fanciest, six-figure earning sailboats (it’s a metaphor: You’re the sailboat). And since it’s entirely in your control (unlike your income and when the Corporate Gods decide to rain cash bonuses down upon you), why not focus your efforts on spending reasonably first?

That’s not to say you can’t buy the things you love and care about. But if your current spending habits involve blindfolding yourself and stumbling through Anthropologie, credit card in outstretched hand, there’s probably some fluff you can trim with ease.

The other day someone DM’ed me an article from CNBC’s Make It about a 29-year-old woman who earns $158,000 from one full-time job and two side hustles. At first, I was like, hell yes, sister! Stack those income sources!

…then I watched the video.

They had her break down her spending and saving every month, and this woman – who takes home $110,000 per year after taxes, or $9,166 per month (roughly), was saving $1,000 per month. $1,000!

She was somehow managing to spend $98,000 per year, or $8,000 per month, as a single person living in a low cost of living area – and CNBC was celebrating her as a Millennial success story.

I slammed my laptop shut in a fit of rage. To me, a woman making $48,000 per year (call it $35,000 after taxes) who’s able to live on $23,000 and save $12,000 is far more impressive.

This means that, year over year, the person who makes $158,000 and the person who makes $48,000 are growing their net worths at the exact same rate (but one of them is working three jobs, and the other is only working one).

So often I talk to people who get caught up in the details of investing without first examining the basics of their spending.

…and it’s a little bit like getting wrapped up in the details of how to paint your nails effectively without worrying that you have a broken hand.

The nails don’t matter if your hand is broken! You have to tend to the big shit first. No amount of nail polish (or fancy investing) will help make up for a broken hand (read: reckless spending).

What makes the big difference, over time, is consistently spending a lot less than you’re earning, and investing the difference.

It’ll feel weird and abnormal as you look around and see almost everyone else you know living barely below (or maybe above) their means, but you’re not here because you’re striving for normal. You’re here because you’re striving for freedom.

To that end, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re investing in or how – just that you’re saving a substantial portion of your income. After all, even if you literally just saved half your income (and didn’t invest it), you’d eventually reach financial independence – no investing required. But if you’re saving only a small fraction, it doesn’t matter how perfectly your investments are set up – you simply have too many holes in your bucket to retain much water.

All of this matters: Earning more, learning how to invest, and spending less. But worrying about earning more or learning how to invest before you master spending less is useless.

If you’re like, “Great, cool, love it – but how the f*** do I spend less?”

I’ve got a whole slew of articles locked and loaded. A veritable budget charcuterie board of options:

• How to Get a Grip On Your Spending

• Minimalism and Financial Independence

• Being “High-Maintenance” is Expensive

• The Top 3 Most Common Spending Mistakes I See

• How Much Does Your Life Cost?

This is one of those articles that feels like it requires a disclaimer, but I’m trying to get away from explaining away my opinions, so I’d encourage you to take this as one individual’s perspective on a purely financial basis and not a personal attack on your spending habits. (Strong start, right?)

That said: Being a woman is expensive. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about being “all natural” or “all made up,” but one certainly costs more.

I don’t even just mean the “pink tax” – I mean the baseline existence of being a woman costs more. Men don’t budget for manicures, pedicures, highlights, waxes, spray tans, facials, or eyelashes – they budget for haircuts. That’s it.

I calculated how much money I used to spend on my general female upkeep:

• $200 every three months for my cut and color

• $100 per month on eyelash extensions

• $15 per month on eyebrow threading

• $100 per month on manicures and pedicures

• $500 per year on makeup

When I broke it down and looked at the average, it equated to about $320 per month (or $3,840 per year) that I was spending on literally being pretty.

Are you kidding?

That’s not negligible. That’s also not fair. I don’t see my boyfriend traipsing to the salon every 12 weeks to get his highlights re-done or schlepping it to the pedicure chair to get his callouses scraped off by a stranger.

After I got super into frugality, I essentially said f*** it – I’m not paying for this shit anymore.

And to just drive home the point about how much this costs over a lifetime, if you assume I’m that high-maintenance for merely 5 years, that’s nearly $20,000 invested in being an attractive woman. I won’t even run it through the investment calculator because I don’t want to become a personal finance guru meme, but if you’re reading my numbers and thinking, damn, that feels in line with (or lower than) what I spend, hopefully your attention has been sufficiently #piqued.

The sad thing is, nothing feels that terrible in the moment. $45 here and there for a gel manicure doesn’t feel like it’s going to derail your retirement goals.

But (okay, screw it, here comes the calculator) my annual hot girl budget (at $3,840 per year, conservatively) would become $62,000 if invested over a 10-year period (investing $320/mo. for 10 years with a 7% rate of return).

UGH! Being a woman is so dumb!

The initial shift

I know that, while seeing the power of your investment is a strong start, it often pales in comparison to the allure of feeling attractive (we’re being totally candid here, right?). I had gotten USED to looking a certain way – fake eyelashes, blonde hair, perfect eyebrows, pink nails. The works.

Then I listened to a podcast about (are you ready for this?) how we’re all essentially being sold lies by the very profitable beauty industry. Exploiting insecurities is LUCRATIVE. And we all know it, sure, but we still play along, because all the OTHER women around us are doing it, too, and we don’t want to be the ugly ducklings combing our unibrows in the corner. But this time, I had never heard someone state the facts so simply.

This female blogger who goes by “Mrs. Frugalwoods” did an interview where she essentially was like, “I mean, sure, I can spend hundreds of dollars every month on hair and makeup, but I’d rather invest it so I can retire earlier and do what I want with my life. I’d rather be free to not work and explore the world than pretty and chained to a desk for an extra 15 years.” That’s an oversimplification, but… it has some merit, and I was like, shit, she’s right!

That stuck with me, and then I noticed not only the amount of money, but the amount of time and planning that had to go into maintaining all these various things. It was all on a schedule that had to be accounted for. In some ways, it felt like an additional chore to schedule the manicure into an already-busy day.

When I decided to pull the plug, I did it little by little – but immediately, I noticed it was just less… stressful. I felt like I had been freed from this weird, subtle obligation.

How I started

The first thing to go were the eyelashes because they were (a) really expensive and (b) stupidly time-consuming. I had this realization rushing to a lash appointment to which I was about to give an hour of my time and $50… for two weeks of long eyelashes. I remember thinking, How long do I feasibly plan to continue doing this? This feels inherently short-lived.

So I did what any reasonable person would do: When it was time for the next one, I canceled, and I literally pulled them off my face one by one, leaving me with a lash line a la Rufus the Naked Mole Rat.

I was HIDEOUS, and mortified.

Enter Latisse, an eyelash solution that helped me grow my natural lashes back to a state of normalcy. Latisse (the generic version that I get is called Bimatoprost) is $75 and lasts between 3-4 months, giving it a cost of between $20 and $25 per month on average. After I noticed how beautifully my lashes regrew, I kept using it – and now they’re insanely long and dark. I know if I stop they’ll go back to “normal,” but I’m good with $20 per month for this prescription – especially because I can use my HSA to pay for it.

If you’re interested, I’d recommend asking your doctor at your routine physical. I have a friend who works for a plastic surgeon, so he prescribed it for me. It’s pretty easy to get your hands on a prescription, and it works.

The next thing to go were the manicures and pedicures. This one was easier to let go of, and I didn’t really replace it with anything. I tried painting my own nails for awhile but ended up enjoying (pretty quickly) the freedom of not being beholden to a gel nail polish schedule. Now I have naked nails and it truthfully doesn’t really bother me. Shedding that $100 expense didn’t hurt too much.

Creative solutions abounded

Some things, like eyebrow threading, were relatively cheap – but I found I could maintain the same shape with tweezers pretty easily. Every once in awhile I’ll go back to get them reshaped, but for the most part, it’s pretty easy to maintain your own eyebrows once they’re properly and professionally snatched once.

I had just become intrigued with full face waxing and threading when I decided to go full Man Mode on my beauty regime, but luckily, I discovered these Tinkle razors (they’re a few bucks for a pack). They have a straight edge, and you essentially lather up with face wash, then scrape the peach fuzz and dead skin cells off your face. It’s extremely exfoliating and creates the most beautiful base for any makeup you end up wearing (more on that later).

There are tons of videos on YouTube that explain how to do it (I’ll link an entertaining one). Between tweezing my own eyebrows and using the straight razor to do a baby “dermaplane” on my face at home every month, I really don’t feel tempted to go get facials or fancy treatments because my skin looks and feels fine.

I used to have terrible acne (and was on Accutane for 8 months), so I understand the allure of facial treatments and expensive products – but at the risk of sounding insensitive, the best thing I’ve done for my skin in adulthood is simplifying the routine. Basic cleanser, basic moisturizer, once-a-month exfoliation. Done.

Where things became more difficult

I’ve always said that my hair is one thing I’ll always continue to pay for, but I’m starting to feel differently now that it’s just about the only high-maintenance thing left about me. I don’t know if I’m competitive with myself or just cheap, but I’m getting to the same point with my hair that I reached with everything else – a mix of “Who cares?” and “I don’t feel like paying for this.”

It’s funny how over time I’ve pulled away all the layers of artificial femininity through either frugality or laziness, and now I’m at the last bastion – the last stake in the ground. Being BLONDE. Growing up, all the prettiest girls in my high school were blonde – even the cool girl friend group was nicknamed “the Blondetourage.” Is it any wonder why I decided to start coloring my hair? Somewhere deep down, I’ve equated blonde with beautiful and popular, and now – 10 years later – I’m still paying someone else to help me keep up appearances. It makes me sad for younger me (and her natural hair color), who I deemed wasn’t sufficient or good enough on her own.

My strategy for prolonging the time between highlights visits was using the purple shampoo from Joico – it’s cheap at Ulta (I think you can get 32 oz. for $20) and it makes your color super vibrant, which helps distract from your roots. That works fairly well, but after you go six months without highlights, it becomes obvious that you’ve abandoned your colorist.

Now I think I’m going to pay for one final appointment to have my roots blended with the blonde so, as it grows, it looks natural, and eventually it’ll all be my natural hair color again.

The undertones of these suggestions

My intention is never to tell you what to do. My intention is always to get you to think critically about how you spend your money, and why.

When it comes to spending on beauty products and treatments, I (personally!) arrived at a point where it felt like it was more trouble than it was worth. I wanted to be more comfortable (naturally) in my own skin, and I didn’t want to feel beholden to treatments and appointments that I scheduled with the consistency and devotion of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders’ practice schedule.

There are certainly times where I see other women with perfect nails, a beautiful blowout, a glowing tan and eyelash extensions and think, Damn, she looks GOOD, but in a lot of ways I’m trying to wean myself off caring about the artificial so much. Having gone to school in Alabama where every girl looked like she grew up in the pageant system and had the flawless skin and pearly white smile to prove it, this was a little bit of an uphill battle.

My “Girly” budget now

Really, it’s just the Latisse every few months – and haircuts where necessary. Clearly, the goal is to get my spending habits as close as possible to that of a man. We’re almost there!

And to bring this full circle: Yes, I do invest the money that used to get washed down the drain with the salon shampoo. My current contributions to my various accounts are:

• $660 per month to my 401(k) + $500 employer match ($1,160/mo.)

• $500 per month to my IRA

• $880 per month to my General Investing account

Obviously, not ALL of that came from my reformed Girly budget, but man – it sure did help. And you know what? I feel more genuinely pretty and like myself than I did before, which was an unintended “win” that came from this female social experiment. Worth a shot, right?

I once read that linking to a bunch of different articles in a post was the cardinal sin of online media, so I apologize for what I’m about to do – but if you haven’t yet, read How to Start Building Your Emergency Fund as a baseline for this post.

This post isn’t intended to be the end-all, be-all guide to proper budgeting (How Much Does Your Life Cost? can probably help more with that). Instead, it’ll cover how you budget for the stuff that is infuriatingly hard to budget for.

You know what I’m talking about: Everyone’s fun stuff usually falls into the same few categories. Travel, dining out, shopping, expensive boutique exercise classes that require flying to other cities to attend (just me?), shows, and otherwise non-essential-for-life-but-essential-for-sanity expenditures that can leave you cringing as you try to reconcile the budget you set with the best of intentions on the first of the month with the credit card bill that comes at the end of the month.

First things first

If you skip this step, everything that comes after it will be useless to you. Seriously: Do this first.

We need to get clear on what your Big Four are going to be. The Big Four are the broad discretionary categories you’re going to commit to, and I’ve chosen four for a few reasons:

1. Big Four just sounded cool.

2. Isolating four things that give you joy when you spend money on them allows you enough freedom to explore new things without devolving into a spend-happy free-for-all.

If I told you to just make a list of every single thing you could possibly buy for fun, your budget would turn into a run-on expensive sentence. We don’t want that.

My big four

My big four are (can you guess based on the examples given above?) travel, dining out, entertainment, and (you ready for this one?) miscellaneous.

“Miscellaneous” was an addition to a more evolved version of my budget – the result of several months in a row where I found myself saying the same thing. “Yeah, I had to pay $200 this month for [insert surprisingly common yet still unexpected expense here], but that’s normal. I’ll just… write it off.” And I’d attempt to play fiscal Jenga with the charge.

Finally, I accepted that life has a funny way of almost-always introducing unexpected line items to your Copilot transactions list every month.

One of the most fun and alluring leisures I could think to provide myself was the leeway to have a place to store my junk drawer expenses that were unavoidable and otherwise un-categorizable. Last month it was a new tire (thank you, potholes). This month it was a slew of new apartment expenses. Who knows what next month will bring?

Before you get into the high-level categories, I’ll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug that if you’re striving for a goal savings rate, the Wealth Planner will help you back into a reasonable “Discretionary” income target.

How much should you be shuffling to discretionary stuff every month?

The short answer is, it depends. (Ugh, so annoying – I know.)

Here’s why it depends: the immediacy and urgency of your present financial situation will almost certainly determine how much you can comfortably piss away on trips to Mexico and DoorDash Waffle House. Let’s generalize a few scenarios so you can get a sense for what I mean:

The financial all-star: 25%

This person has no credit card debt, a fully funded emergency fund ($12,000 – $18,000 in savings, or more), is contributing at least 10% to their 401(k), and investing in their IRAs and general investing accounts at a moderate pace. This person can probably get away with 25% of their income going toward bullshit.

There is no hard and fast rule here. I’m probably on the slightly more conservative side of the spectrum, financially, but I’m definitely not as frugal as those in pursuit of true financial independence who save 80% of their take-home pay.

I’m all about guilt-free spending money, and to me, I’d (ideally) like to be saving and investing more than I’m spending on $65 virtual wellness seminars and $7 coffee with names like “Jet Fuel.”

The “cruising altitude” saver: 20%

This person is actively contributing to a growing emergency fund, has little to no debt, and has begun contributing to their 401(k) up to the company match. For someone like this, I’d say you have to reign in the discretionary horses a little and keep prioritizing the behavior that’s going to skyrocket you to all-star status. You probably don’t want to exceed 20% of your take-home pay going toward fun stuff. Let’s look at a fake breakdown:

Monthly take-home pay: $5,000

Emergency fund contribution: 15%, or $750

401(k) contribution: 8%, or $400

Fun stuff allotment: 20%, or $1,000

Notice how the combination of your savings and 401(k) contributions still outpaces your fun money?

This leaves $2,850 for living expenses.

The catcher-upper: 10%

Decisions in your past may have put you in a position to be digging yourself out of a bit of a hole, Stanley Yelnats-style. This means it’s just going to take a little bit of discipline and sacrifice to get you back to baseline. “Well, well, well – if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.” This person may have little to no savings, some (or a lot of) high-interest debt, and isn’t contributing to a 401(k).

We’ll reverse-engineer your budget because the bottom line is this: The needs of Future You are far more dire than your need for another to-go order from Sweetgreen.

This is what we call living “close to the edge,” because one big, unexpected expense could be the difference between getting by and falling off the fiscal cliff.

Here’s the good news: I promise the assurance and security of putting in the work to set up base camp several hundred yards away from the edge will feel infinitely better than a lifetime supply of whatever got you into credit card debt in the first place.

The How Much Does Your Life Cost? article addresses how to start paying off debt, but I’m beginning to think that topic probably warrants its own piece – stay tuned. Other than that, your order of priorities are:

1. Emergency fund in tandem with credit card debt

2. 401(k)

3. Other investing

This means I’d be shoveling as much as humanly possible every month toward priority #1 until you take a few steps back from the cliff. I wouldn’t suggest spending any more than 10% of your income every month on fun stuff.

If you make $3,500 per month, that means $350 is your budget for whatever you want and the rest of your dollars need a more noble job.

It’s temporary, I promise – but we need to get you out of the hole first.

Now that you know how much you can set aside, how do you plan for “wants”?

In one word: Annualization.

Not every discretionary budget needs to be viewed on an annual basis, but for the inconsistent ones, this can be a handy trick.

Your “Dining Out” budget can probably be considered on a monthly cadence: Let’s say you’ve decided $500 of your hard-earned monthly income is earmarked for $8 vodka sodas and $12 party platters of things like fried jalapeños and otherwise batter- and cheese-covered kitchen oddities.

$500/mo. breaks down to approximately $115 per week, and if you mostly eat out on the weekends, you can consider it $57 for Friday and $57 for Saturday. That’s a pretty slick transition from an amorphous monthly amount to a more tangible idea: You probably know what $57 at a restaurant or bar will get you.

(This is the part where people are either like, “Oh yeah, easy!” or, “Oh shit, I spend $100 at dinner and drinks every single time I go out.” Now’s the time to ask yourself which category, the former or the latter, your income directs you toward.)

But what about categories like Travel and Home Improvement?

A $300 monthly travel budget or a $200 monthly home improvement allotment might be harder to conceptualize. After all, if you’re not entrenched in the travel rewards world, you can easily spend $300 on a single round-trip ticket (if you’d like to become entrenched in travel rewards and sit proudly atop a mountain of points, I direct you here).

You can think of your more inconsistent discretionary budgets on an annual basis. This way, the $300/mo. travel budget becomes $3,600 per year. If you want to take two major trips, you can think of it like $1,800 per trip. Or if you’re on a quarterly travel cadence, $900 for each of four trips. These numbers feel a little more aligned with travel expenses, but the “$300/mo.” framework still allows you to conceptualize what percentage of your take-home pay every month you’re setting aside for globetrotting.

Scaling up or scaling down

The TL;DR explanation for this is simply scale. It’s easier for us to wrap our heads around the idea of spending $300 per month on travel than it is to accept dropping $1,800 on two different trips, but if you’re setting aside that $300 every month, the money will be there for you when it’s time to use it.

I like to use something called “rollover budgets” to make that possible – every month, the unused money in any given discretionary category rolls forward to the next month. After a few months of low to no spending, you’re sitting on $1,200 in an unused travel budget, just begging to be guiltlessly squandered on a Main Cabin seat to Amsterdam (yes, Main Cabin, not Economy, because you’re a rich bitch now who benefits from money management and accrual of unspent funds).

In our dining example, we scaled down: We took a big number in the context of dining out ($500/mo.) and broke it down into a per-Friday or per-Saturday amount to guide us a little more clearly.

Of course, the fine print of these suggestions is that you’re more than welcome to go on one trip per month, spending $300 every time, or to go to two fabulous meals per month and drop $250 each – you don’t have to alternately let all your monthly budgets accumulate or disperse them evenly throughout the month. It’s up to you, and your behavior will probably change month-to-month, too.

But this scalability is (usually) the reason fun-budgeting is so difficult for most of us with human brains – it’s difficult to be told your limit is $500 then naturally spend it at a moderately paced clip throughout the month without some sort of scaled-down representation of what that looks like in practice (e.g., $120ish per weekend).

In summary

1. Decide on your Big Four.

2. Look at your take-home pay and assign yourself into one of the three categories above, then multiply by 25%, 20%, or 10% accordingly. Wiggle room is welcome – but use your best judgment.

3. That figure (25%, 20% or 10% of your take-home pay) is your fun money budget to be dispersed as you see fit across your Big Four. Nothing is set in stone, so if you aggressively overshoot or undershoot a particular category, you can always adjust later.

4. Decide which budgets need to be scaled down and which need to be scaled up. Here’s a rough guide:

Scaled-down budgets (e.g., break down monthly into weekly or daily, depending on how often you purchase)

• Dining out

• Entertainment

• Miscellaneous

• Gym/exercise/wellness

Scaled-up budgets (e.g., you may want to combine several months of budget together to more accurately reflect how you spend in these categories)

• Travel

• Home improvement

• Shopping

I wish you sincerely joyful spending.