I was lying in a hospital bed doing math in my head. Not the kind of math they teach you — the kind where you’re calculating how many years your special needs son might have to survive without you and whether the money you’ve been spending on drive-thru coffee and streaming services would’ve made the difference between him being okay and him being homeless.
That’s what it took for me to change. Not a budgeting app. Not a Dave Ramsey podcast. A medical scare and the realization that every dollar I was wasting on comfort was a dollar I was stealing from my son’s future.
What My Spending Actually Looked Like
I never thought of myself as someone with a spending problem. I wasn’t buying boats or luxury watches. I was buying normal stuff — just too much of it, too often, without thinking.
When I finally sat down and went through three months of bank statements, here’s what I found:
- 7 streaming services: ~$120/month. Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, and one I’d literally forgotten I had. Seven. I wasn’t even watching most of them. They just auto-renewed month after month because cancelling felt like a task I’d get to later.
- Other subscriptions and apps: ~$330/month. Cloud storage I didn’t need, premium app tiers I’d signed up for during free trials and never cancelled, a music service, news subscriptions I never read, a couple of monthly box services. Each one was $10-30, so none of them felt like a big deal individually. Together? Over three hundred dollars a month, gone.
- Fast food and drive-thrus: ~$400/month. This was the one that embarrassed me. Breakfast sandwich and coffee on the way to work. Fast food for lunch because I didn’t pack anything. Drive-thru on the way home because I was tired and cooking felt like one more thing I didn’t have energy for. Five, ten, fifteen dollars at a time — barely noticeable per transaction, devastating in total.
- Coffee shops: ~$200/month. I was stopping for coffee at least once a day, sometimes twice. $5-7 each time. I told myself I deserved it. And I did — everyone deserves coffee. But not $200 worth of someone else making it for me.
Total: roughly $1,050 a month on things that weren’t making my life meaningfully better. I freed up about $600 of that. The rest I kept — I’m human, not a monk.
What I Tried That Didn’t Work
Before the hospital, I’d tried to get my spending under control multiple times. Here’s what failed and why.
Budgeting Apps
I downloaded three different ones over the course of a year. Each time, I’d set it up, categorize my spending, look at the colorful pie charts, feel bad about myself, and then ignore the app for three weeks until I deleted it. The problem wasn’t information — I knew I was overspending. The problem was that I didn’t care enough to stop. An app can show you the damage, but it can’t give you a reason to change.
The Cash Envelope System
I tried the thing where you put cash in envelopes for each spending category and when the envelope is empty, you’re done. It lasted about two weeks. I’d run out of cash in the “food” envelope and just use my debit card instead. The system requires discipline, which is exactly what I was trying to build. Using a tool that requires the thing you don’t have yet is a recipe for failure.
Cold Turkey
I tried cancelling everything at once. All subscriptions, no more eating out, no coffee shops, full austerity mode. That lasted even less time. I was miserable within a week and by week two I was spending more than before because I felt like I’d “earned it” after depriving myself. Turns out willpower is a terrible long-term strategy.
What Actually Worked: A Hospital Bed and Basic Math
The thing that finally changed my spending wasn’t a technique. It was a reason.
My son has profound autism. He’s 21. He can’t read, can’t manage money, can’t navigate the world alone. His life expectancy is somewhere around 50 to 60 years. I started doing the math — not budgeting math, but life math.
When he’s 38 and I’m gone, is my Netflix subscription more important than him having a funded special needs trust?
When he’s 45 and needs housing support, is today’s drive-thru coffee worth him potentially being homeless for even one year because the money wasn’t there?
When I put it in those terms — my comfort now versus his survival later — the decision wasn’t hard anymore. It was obvious. I just needed a reason that was bigger than the short-term pleasure of spending.
How I Actually Cut $600 a Month
Once I had the reason, the mechanics were simple. Not easy — but simple.
Subscriptions: Cancelled Everything, Added Back Slowly
I cancelled all seven streaming services and every app subscription in one afternoon. Then I waited. If after two weeks I genuinely missed something, I’d re-subscribe. One service. Just one.
Know how many I re-subscribed to? One. Out of seven streaming services and a dozen app subscriptions, I actually missed one. Everything else was just background noise I was paying for out of habit.
Monthly savings: ~$350
Coffee: Made It at Home
I bought a decent coffee maker — not an expensive one, just something that made coffee I actually liked. Cost me about $40. That $40 replaced $200 a month in coffee shop runs. I still get coffee out occasionally — maybe once a week as an actual treat, not a daily habit.
Monthly savings: ~$150
Fast Food: Started Packing Meals
This was the hardest one because it wasn’t just about money — it was about energy. After work, after dealing with everything that comes with being a single parent of a special needs child, the last thing I wanted to do was cook. Drive-thrus exist because they solve that exact problem.
What worked: I stopped trying to cook elaborate meals and started making simple stuff in bulk. Rice and chicken on Sunday, portions for the week. Sandwiches. Nothing fancy. The bar wasn’t “cook like a chef” — it was “don’t drive through Wendy’s on the way home.” That’s a low bar, and that’s why it worked.
Monthly savings: ~$250
Some of the food savings got eaten up (literally) by groceries, so the net was lower than $400. But between subscriptions, coffee, and fast food, I freed up about $600 a month.
Where That $600 Goes Now
I could tell you I immediately started investing it all and watching it compound. That’s what a financial blogger is supposed to say.
The truth is more practical. Some of it goes toward my son’s ABLE account. Some goes toward paying down the debt I talked about in my divorce and credit rebuild story. Some goes into a basic emergency fund so the next time something breaks — the car, an appliance, my body — it doesn’t go on a credit card.
And some of it I’m using to build alternate sources of income, because I’ve learned that saving your way to financial security is only half the equation. You can only cut so much. At some point, you need to make more. That’s a different article, but it’s part of the same mindset shift — thinking about the long game instead of what feels good right now.
The Mindset That Changed Everything
I want to be clear about something: this isn’t a willpower story. I didn’t become more disciplined. I’m the same person who spent $600 a month on fast food and signed up for seven streaming services. I didn’t level up or unlock some productivity hack.
What changed was the frame. Every purchase became a question: is this more important than my son’s future?
Your frame might be different. Maybe it’s retirement. Maybe it’s getting out of debt. Maybe it’s leaving a bad situation and needing every dollar to build a new life. Whatever it is, the technique doesn’t matter until the reason does.
Every budgeting article in the world will tell you to track your spending, make a plan, and stick to it. That’s technically correct and completely useless for most people. Because the problem was never that I didn’t know how to stop spending. The problem was that I didn’t have a strong enough reason to.
Find the reason first. The rest is just logistics.
If You’re Where I Was
- Pull three months of bank statements. Don’t estimate. Don’t guess. Look at the actual transactions. Add up every subscription, every drive-thru, every $5 coffee. The number will be worse than you think. That’s the point.
- Cancel everything and add back only what you miss. Not what you think you’ll miss — what you actually miss after two weeks without it. The gap between those two things is where your money has been hiding.
- Lower the bar on cooking. You don’t need meal prep Sunday or complicated recipes. You need to not go through a drive-thru. Rice, protein, simple meals. The goal is good enough, not Instagram-worthy.
- Find a reason that hits harder than the spending feels good. Mine was my son. Yours might be something completely different. But “I should spend less” will never beat the dopamine of a convenient purchase. You need something that makes the convenient purchase feel wrong.
- Keep some of it. I didn’t cut everything. I still have one streaming service. I still get coffee out once a week. Going full monk mode is how you end up bingeing. Cutting 60% of the waste is better than cutting 100% and lasting two weeks.
I freed up $600 a month. Over a year, that’s $7,200. Over five years, that’s $36,000. Over the decades my son might need that money? It’s the difference between his trust being funded and it being empty.
That hospital bed was the best financial planning session I ever had.
— Thomas