Nobody feels a ₹20 chai. Or a ₹60 auto ride. Or a ₹40 packet of chips. Each one is small enough that you do not even think about it, and that is exactly the problem.
When people look at where their money went, they usually look for the big things: rent, a phone, a trip. But often the thing that surprises them is the pile of tiny spends that never got noticed.
Do the multiplication
The trick is to stop looking at one purchase and look at the habit. A few simple examples:
- Two ₹20 cups of chai a day, for 30 days: ₹1,200 a month.
- A ₹60 auto ride, 20 times a month: ₹1,200 a month.
- A ₹150 snack or coffee, 4 times a week, for about 4 weeks: ₹2,400 a month.
None of these feels like a problem on the day. Together, in this example, they come to ₹4,800 a month. That is more than many people realise they spend on “nothing in particular”.
This is not about guilt
A good cup of chai with a friend is worth ₹20. Nobody should feel bad about it. The goal is not to remove every small pleasure. It is to know the total, so that you spend it on purpose.
A useful question for each repeated spend: would I be happy to pay this amount, if I added it up and saw it in one number? If yes, keep it. If it makes you wince, that is your cut.
How to find your own cuts
- Record every spend, even the tiny ones, for a month. Skipping the small ones defeats the point, because they are the whole story here.
- Give each one a short category: chai, auto, snacks, food delivery.
- Sort categories by how many entries they have, not just by total. A category with 20 entries averaging ₹50 is a habit. A single ₹1,000 purchase is not.
- Pick one or two to change, not ten. Maybe carry a bottle of water, or take the bus on two days a week. Small changes that stick beat big ones that don't.
A rule of thumb
A good sign of a “cut” is a category with five or more purchases in a month at a low average: many small payments rather than one big one. HisaabRakho uses exactly that rule to flag them for you (five or more purchases averaging under ₹200). It is not magic, just a quick way to point at the places where small amounts are adding up.
Doing this with HisaabRakho
You type the amount and a couple of words (say 30, then “chai”), and it files the spend under a category for you. The home screen then shows where the month's money went, ranks your categories, and marks the “death by a thousand cuts” ones. You can see this on the home screen after your first few entries.
If you pay by UPI, here is how to track that spending in one place. And if some of your spending is really money lent to friends, keep it separate with a simple udhaar system, so it does not distort your numbers.