Why budgeting feels like a chore to Gen Z & Millennials (and how to fix that)

You promised yourself that you’d track every single rupee this month to understand your expenses.

Day 1: You’re the GOAT of budgeting!
Day 3: You realised at bedtime that you forgot to add the pani puri expense from yesterday.
Day 5: You will just add all of today’s expenses tomorrow altogether.
Day 7: Does this even matter anymore?! You’re doing kinda decent with your finances.

 

If you feel bad about not sticking with it and are blaming yourself then hold on.

Here’s the (good) news flash: it’s not a “you” problem. It’s a systematic problem down to human nature.
Budgeting should not feel like a part time job that you hate from your guts, and offer little upside.

 

If we look at it carefully, budgeting feels exhausting for a few reasons. Let’s understand them:

  • Budgeting feels like dieting. Nobody likes to be told “you can’t eat this”. That just makes you crave it even harder!
  • It’s too time consuming. Tracking every little transaction takes effort. You don’t want to spend your precious weekend time categorising expenses like an accountant. Best to binge another episode, tbh.
  • Progress is invisible. If you start working out, you see muscles grow. If you budget, the results aren’t always obvious. You don’t see your financial health improving in a month or two, so it can be hard to stay motivated.
  • Decision fatigue. Every day, you make thousands of micro-decisions. “Should I spend on this or save it?” By 8 pm, your brain is tired, and it’s way easier to just spend and/or lose track of expenses.

Ok, ok. Understood! But how do we fix it? “Trying harder” is not the solution. Source: dude, trust me.
It’s down to building a system that works for you and not against you! Let that sink in for a minute.

 

Here’s how you can make budgeting feel effortless.

While building Galgal, we carefully picked up principles from James Clear’s Atomic Habits along with our onground research with our target audience in partnership with Tinker Labs (a design thinking agency) to ensure we make it as smooth and easy as we possibly can.

 

This is how we do it:

  • We make it obvious. When things are out of sight, they are out of mind. That’s why auto-budgeting rules and progress in Galgal are right there, in your face (staring romantically back at you). No more digging through bank statements and UPI transactions’ history to find where your money went.
  • We make it easy. If something is hard, chances are you won’t stick to it. This is why we moved hell on Earth to figure our auto-categorisation of spends to map them as either “Essential” or “Guilt-free”. All of this so that you don’t have to do it consciously and manually.
  • We make it satisfyingggg. Seen those video game XP bars fill up? It’s kinda satisfying, isn’t it? That’s exactly how Galgal’s savings pitchers fill up in time to show you clear progress and give you that dopamine hit for something good (for once).
  • We make it repeatable. Think of it like a dance practice, the more you do it, the better you get. TrendZ on Galgal shows you exactly where your money goes, saving you all that cognitive load of diagnosing the issue so that you can focus your energy on deciding how to course correct and where you wish to reduce your expenses.

 

Why is this bullseye for the youth?

Look, we are a bunch of Gen Z and Millennials too, just pushing our team to build and optimize the app for the youth. We hate getting preached on money matters so here’s what we do differently.

  1. No more “can’t do” attitude. Instead of telling you what you can’t spend on. We help you figure out what you can spend on. And help strategise for it. Our guilt-free balance and custom goals feature takes care of two critical things – your short term impulses that you don’t wanna silence and feel regret over, and your long-term savings plans for things that add value and character to life such as aspirational purchases, travel.
  2. No more manual work. Look outside the window, it’s not 2012 anymore, we have automation for everything. So why is it not available for budgeting? We just took all of that mental load and shoved it down the thrash by introducing auto-budgeting rules.
  3. Built for quick wins. We know you don’t have the patience to stick around for 6 months to see progress so we made the data real-time. You start seeing your spending behaviour in a matter of ONE WEEK. Nuts, right?
  4. Works for you vs against you. Our budgeting rules, spend categorisation, custom goals, and TrendZ are all designed to work with each other like your personal ‘highly motivated and wholesome accounts department’ and not some bureaucratic web of holy moly what the hell is even that.

 

Lovely! Now you must have a burning question. How do we get started? That’s simple.

Start small, start with Galgal.
Create a Cosmos Bank Savings account on Galgal and make it your default spending + savings account to make the most of it.
Set up the auto-budgeting rules as per the tutorials within the app, deposit money into your account and start witnessing greatness.

Sign up now and take the first step towards building healthy money habits.

 

Disclaimer: You will not magically turn into a GOAT level financial guru within just 10 minutes of using the app. Make sure to stay consistent, bud.