How to use the sheet
Each time you talk yourself out of something, put it on a line: what it was, what you were ready to pay, and what you actually spent. The difference is the number that matters, and it is the one that adds up.
Spent less than you planned? That line still counts. Ninety planned and forty spent is a fifty dollar line. A sheet that only has room for perfect days would throw those lines away, and for most people the partial decisions are the majority.
This sheet has no streak. A week with three slips and a week with none are added up the same way.
What I decided not to spend
Planned spend minus actual spend equals the Diff.
| Line | What I nearly bought | Ready to spend | Actually spent | The Diff |
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| 30 |
Color one box for every ten dollars, or pick your own step and write it here: ____________
What goes in each column
Two of the five columns do the work, and the other three exist so the two make sense later.
Ready to spend is the number you had actually accepted paying, which is often lower than the most expensive version you could justify afterward. If you were choosing between a $240 replacement and a $45 repair, the honest figure is $240, because that was a real option you were weighing. If you saw something for $2,000 and closed the tab, that was never yours to spend and it does not belong on the sheet. That honesty is the only rule that matters, because an inflated total is a total you stop believing, and once you stop believing it you stop filling it in.
Actually spent is often zero. Spending less still counts. Ninety planned and forty spent is a fifty dollar line, and for most people those partial decisions outnumber the outright refusals.
The Diff is the subtraction. Do it in your head, at the moment, while you still remember both numbers.
Printing the sheet
The sheet is built to fit one side of A4 or US Letter in portrait, with the page furniture stripped out and the color dropped to ink, so a home printer is not asked to reproduce a cream background across a whole sheet. Print from your browser, or choose Save as PDF in the print dialog if you want to keep it on a phone.
If your printer adds its own margins and the last row falls onto a second page, set the scale to 95% and it fits. There is no print button worth trusting more than your own browser's, so the one on this page just opens the same dialog.
When the sheet is full
Thirty lines is roughly a month at three decisions a week, which is a realistic rate for somebody paying attention without turning it into a hobby. When it fills up, add the Diff column, write the total at the bottom, and start a new sheet at zero.
Do not carry the total forward onto the next sheet. Each sheet should be able to stand on its own as a month, because a running total across six sheets stops being something you can check and turns into a number you either believe or do not.
If you want the total to keep going without adding it up yourself, the app can do that for you.
If paper stops being the point
A sheet is a good way to find out whether the habit sticks, because it costs nothing and there is no app to abandon. If it does stick, the same subtraction runs on a phone with the totals worked out for you, on this page without installing anything, or in the app on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Windows, Linux and Android.
There is also a calculator for the other question a filled sheet raises, which is how long this pace takes to reach the goal written at the top of the sheet.