Budgets!
Every month, I set up an Excel spreadsheet to do my budget. Every month, I have it calculate the remaining funds, after bills, and divide them by the number of days to give me my daily budgeted spending amount. And, about every day, I check my account balance and update the spreadsheet.
And, it seems, every month I forget to do the actual "days remaining" division, thus scaring myself into spending less and less as the days go on.
Effective, but when I'm down to $12/day including gas, food, and incidentals I feel damn poor.
Then, when I got sick, I got even more crazy about it. How am I going to afford cough medicine? etc.
So, anyway, I can sort of relax. Take a deep breath. Why? Because now I know what the real daily total is, which means I'll have actually saved some cash this month. (Well, maybe not after I pay the car pay't...)