ADHD

Budgets are useful tools, but they really should be temporary. If you have a major change in income or expenses, it can warrant monitoring for a while. But once you've reached a point of financial stability, you will know what you can afford already. Setting up auto pay on regular bills, putting balance alerts on your accounts, and just acting your wage makes it pretty easy.

But honestly, what you can afford is just a hard cap on what you should be spending. You should be living below your means already so you can build up investments to retire on. Then unexpected expenses are easily handled by scratching something off your emergency fund. And windfalls mean you can reach your financial independence goals that much faster. Until then, you don't have to live as if you're destitute, but just be frugal.

Seriously, the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck is horrifying. If you are one of them, you should be alarmed. Things aren't going to get cheaper, and wages are going to struggle to keep up. And at a certain point, you won't be able to work. So you have to remember that your future self is a dependent for your current self.

If you haven't planned much, here's a helpful priority pipeline for how to work towards financial security. I stole it from one of the finance subreddits. It assumes you're in the US for the tax-privileged efficiency stuff, but the gist is just keep putting your money in the most important/efficient buckets until they're full, then move on to the next.