I had a friend and her husband who were
terrible with money. They simply could not stop spending. They finally got it under control with two strange but simple steps:
1.) They froze their credit cards in a big block of ice--so they had them in case of
true emergencies, but it would take about 4 hours to thaw them and by then the immediate need to purchase
that thing had passed. Cutting them up hadn't worked because they always just ordered new ones.
2.) They took all of their cash at payday and split it up into about 15 different lock boxes (the kind with a slit on the top for money to go in) according to their budget--we have this much money for gas, this much for food, etc. Then they froze the keys to the lockboxes. Only once or twice did she forget to thaw the right key when she knew, for example, that she was going to go to the grocery story that afternoon. And if she got 3/4ths of the way through the month and a particular box was empty, that was just tough. The bills were pretty static, so they never missed those again, and they figured out their main problem, which was that they were spending about 3 times as much on food as they thought they were. They lowered the amount that went into the "entertainment" lockbox accordingly, and all was well.
Even with their improved self-control, they use this method to this day. However, it obviously takes a lot of planning, not to mention countertop space for all those boxes.
