You will record every unplanned purchase for two weeks to find your triggers.
Most people can tell you roughly what they spend in a month. Very few can tell you why the unplanned part happens: what time of day it is, where they are, what they were doing just before, and how they felt. Those are the conditions you can actually change, and the only reliable way to find them is to write them down while they're fresh. This exercise runs for two weeks, which is long enough to catch a payday, two weekends and the ordinary weekdays in between.
You need something you'll have with you at the moment of purchase, so a notes app or a simple spreadsheet on your phone usually works better than a notebook at home. Set up columns for the date and time, the item, the amount, the payment method, the place or app, the trigger, and the feeling.
The trigger is whatever happened just before you decided to buy. It might be a notification, a colleague suggesting a group order, walking past a shop, a sale email, being tired after work, or scrolling in bed. The feeling is a word or two: bored, stressed, happy, lonely, rewarded, rushed.
Payment method comes from lesson 4.1. Recording it here lets you check whether your unplanned spending clusters around saved card details, BNPL or a particular app.
Record every purchase you didn't plan that morning. If you woke up intending to buy lunch, lunch doesn't count, but upgrading to a S$22 meal when you'd meant to spend S$8 does count, for the difference. If you planned to buy shampoo and also bought S$30 of other things at the pharmacy, the S$30 counts.
Be generous in what you record. The small purchases matter, because they're the ones that repeat. A S$6 bubble tea three times a week is S$18 a week, which over a year is close to a thousand dollars.
Log each purchase within a few hours. If you leave it until the evening, the trigger and feeling columns turn into guesses, and those are the two columns this diary exists for.
At the end of the two weeks, sort the diary by the trigger column and add up the amounts for each trigger. Merge similar triggers. "Instagram ad", "TikTok shop" and "scrolling" are probably one trigger: social media in your downtime.
Then look at the feeling column within each group. A trigger that always comes with the same feeling is worth noting, because the feeling may be the real trigger.
Darren logged 17 unplanned purchases over the fortnight, totalling S$462. Grouped by trigger, they looked like this.
Late-night scrolling in bed came first, with five purchases worth S$186, all through apps with saved cards, and the feeling column said "bored" or "tired" every time. After drinks or a long day came next: four purchases, mostly taxis and supper deliveries, worth S$142, and the feeling was "tired" or "can't be bothered". Third was group orders at work, four purchases worth S$96, which he marked "didn't want to be the one who said no". Four smaller purchases worth S$38, game top-ups on the MRT, made up the rest.
His three main triggers were late-night scrolling at S$186, tiredness after a long day or drinks at S$142, and group orders at S$96. Together they came to S$424 of the S$462. If those two weeks are typical, that's around S$900 a month of spending he never decided on in any real sense.
Two things surprised him. The first was that sales and offers, which he'd assumed were his weakness, barely appeared. The second was how little the purchases had to do with wanting the items. Most of them were about the state he was in.
This diary is for finding the triggers, and it doesn't need to fix them yet. Fixing comes later. Money Foundations, lesson 4.3, Small habits that slow impulse spending, covers frictions like waiting rules and removing saved cards, and lesson 8.2 of this course shows how to design your surroundings so the bad choices become slower. Both work much better when you know which three situations to aim them at.
Resist the urge to change your behaviour during the two weeks. If you start skipping purchases because you know you'll have to log them, the diary will understate your real triggers. Spend normally and record honestly.
Start the diary today, or on your next payday if it's close. Keep it for the full fourteen days, and at the end, name your three main triggers and the total you spent on each.
Keep the diary for two weeks and write your three main triggers with the total spent on each.
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