People forget how hard basic money management is when you're poor. (Advice thread?)

[F4lconF16]

When you get paid for weird hours by multiple sources and jobs at different times in the month on different pay schedules, it can quickly become overwhelming. Add that to the mix of high stress, low free-time, working environments we live and work in and to the lack of any proper education in finances by our school system, and budgeting becomes a topic that is usually poorly used, if isn't simply ignored.

It doesn't help that most traditional budgeting methods have feedback loops that prey on the budgeter. It is much easier to budget regularly when you have money. When you don't, every little mistake is another reason to abandon the budget entirely. When you have a medical issue, when your car breaks, when an insurance payment comes up and you don't have the money, it makes you feel like a failure. You didn't plan right, you didn't think ahead, you didn't see the emergency coming, you fucked up. It's your fault, and now your whole budget is thrown off.

Classical budgeting demoralizes and delegitimizes the efforts of the poor to survive. When what precious little you have is constantly slipping through your fingers, it really makes you wonder what the point is of tracking your money. There's no point to it. You never have enough, ever. What does it matter if you know where that $5 went? You're going to be in the hole $700 anyways because of a flat tire that destroyed a brake disc on your car.

Anyways, I bring this up because I'm doing my budgeting for the month and I was curious how other people do it. I'm lucky that my parents love spreadsheets, so I know how useful they are. I'm now using a much better platform than excel (which I will discuss in a comment), and have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. I wanted to post this in case there were people out there who wanted help or who might want to suggest things.