Using your “Daily Spend” to keep your perspective

Getting Perspective

Lifehacker featured a post today, The Behaviors that Destroy Your Financial Health (and How to Avoid Them), and in there is a point which says losing your financial perspective is bad. A solution offered is for you to understand your “daily spend” allotment, an estimate of how much you can spend per day after all your other obligations are covered. Understanding how much that shirt or video game costs relative to what you can reasonably spend per day may help guide your spending decisions.

If you think that’s something that’d be useful for you, Claratii can help you figure that out. If you’re already a Claratii user, go to the Incomes and Expenses page. If you’re not, sign up!

You can calculate your “daily spend” allotment by simply subtracting the total Daily Average income from the total Daily Average expense.

In the case of our demo account here, we see that the “daily spend” allotment is:
$142.86 – $99.63 = $43.23

Truly Knowing What You Can Spend

While getting some financial perspective is great, if you really want to know if you if you can afford to buy the thing you’re staring at, you can add it as a Want or just have Claratii tell you if you can afford it now. I have the Can I Afford It Now? page as an icon on my phone’s home screen so I can very quickly know if I’m good or if I should wait. We wrote about the Can I Afford It Now feature a little while back.