How do you do when it comes to money management?

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I still live with my parents so I don't have a separate income. I do get pocket money though. Usually I buy food for my cat using the cash I receive. I almost never buy things like clothes when I know I don't need them. My NT friend loves shopping for clothes and I can't understand it . Sometimes I even feel bad when I buy myself snacks or coffee at school, lol. I'm way too conservative when it comes to money.

I think when I get a job I'll most likely plan everything and focus on the essential stuff like bills, food first.

When my pension began, my habits did not change, so the money is accumulating. I might need it for teeth or another crisis. Yesterday, I felt very extravagant, buying a new leaf rake so I would not have to wait more weeks for mine to be returned so I could tidy up for spring. I buy an adjustable style which can do many different jobs well.
Long ago, I noticed that I was wearing out a power drill every year, so I bought a professional model. It is still fine, but very obsolete. When I was young, I was careful to have only one of each kind of tool. They were easier to keep track of when they were fewer. Now, I save time by having duplicates of the most common ones in handy locations.

I had no problem managing money when I was younger. But I was lucky because I've always had frugal spending habits and a modest surplus of income. So there wasn't much management involved, just a matter of paying the bills when they came in, occasionally checking my balance and being pleasantly surprised that it had grown a bit.

For some reason, as time went by I became more apprehensive about the process of bill-paying, and I started to put off the task until the situation was getting rather critical. I would worry about whether or not I'd written the cheque out and addressed the envelope properly. I'm still rather like that now. I've always managed to get the bills paid, but have had quite a bit of anxiety from my own delay tactics and the "what if it goes wrong?" feeling.

It was rather better for a few years when they brought in online banking and I became good at clicking the buttons - so much easier than the old methods. But they've complicated it all now with ever-increasing, ever-changing security steps, and having experienced a few problems from that here and there, every time I'm about to log in and pay the bills I feel anxious that it might go wrong. I'm already essentially locked out of one or two of my less important accounts. I'm not looking forward to phoning them up to try and get it put right. My computer is old - Windows 7 32-bit - and fathoming how to work a new computer one day is going to be a proper can of worms. And one of these days the banking websites will probably drop support for my operating system. There are already some financial things my computer won't do properly. Forever changes. I just want to carry on as I am without any more learning curves, but the world won't let me do that for much longer. I fear they'll eventually make all finance a smartphone-only thing, and I have zero skills on a smartphone.

^ Same here. The NatWest internet banking service via my laptop is still usable at the moment, but rather ominously now they're continuously asking me for my mobile phone number (I don't have one), and I'm wondering where this might be leading.

^^ i would be well and truly f***** if I could only use a smartphone with the Co-op banking service. I've got a smartphone my (s) daughter gave me, but i have difficulty getting the swiping right. She says it's because I'm too heavy handed(due to dyspraxia?).

Next month I've got to be more disciplined finance wise.

I've not got a swiping device to co-operate with me yet. I'm also ideologically against smartphones - their monthly contracts would be money down the drain (why would I want that when I hardly ever make a call? Pay-as-you-go dumbphone is all I could need). And I don't relish the thought of carrying a device that can track me wherever I go. Another learning curve trying to figure out how to block the tracking, which might even be impossible for all I know. And even if I got a smartphone and figured out how to use it, I expect the first thing that would happen is that the bank would say "we don't recognise this device, give us a call to sort it out."

I've always been pretty good at managing money. My parents handed me the family finance when I was 16 and I had to be very responsible. Never borrowed (other than mortgage). If I don't have the money then I don't shop. Now after several classes in personal finance I think I'm decent at investing as well. You really just need some knowledge and self-control.

My brother has poor self-control, so he used the envelope system and paid for everything with cash. Worked OK so far.

Much better than I used to. I never really learned how to budget money, so didn't really know how to so I'd end up losing track of how much I spent or had left. Luckily my boyfriend is good at budgeting so he's able to help with that.

Of course in my early 20's it wasn't just lack of budgeting skills, I was in a rather self destructive state because of my PTSD and being in denial of it/trying to run away from it as well as struggles with autism I didn't know I had yet, so sometimes just didn't care if I was being irresponsible.

I'm good at budgeting things and planning things out but in the details my downfall is that I'm pretty impulsive. That's one of my downfalls in general when it comes to practical functioning, I'm much more of an unhibited individual driven by a weird combination of spiritual logic and emotional output. I will sometimes do things a symbol for manifestation of something else, I certainly don't keep my feet on the ground unless I'm working out some rough data on numbers on paper.

I have 7.
Beat you.

I do very badly. I'm unemployed and basically unemployable. Have credit card debt I can't pay for each month. Money is and always has been my biggest stress. I do think, however, that this situation is more a consequence of trauma than of autism. I was continually told how useless I was as a kid.

thats good but our oil wells have given me enough to live on so I think Im fine.Our oil company is worth millions so thats good but technically my parents took away control over all my money and made me give it to thtiem.I am just promised an inheritance and trust fund.They put me on welfare we own milliions as a family.They dont even let me use my debit card or buy anything or shop online or even have any bank accounts.They swindled me out of my life savings.

Going a bit off the main topic of the thread now, but you can get PAYG options on smart phones. This is what I do, I usually do £10 top ups as and when I need them, and that keeps me in calls, texts, and data for several months as I really don't use it much at all.

I also resisted Smart phones for a long time. This was for a few reasons, but being wary of the contracts I thought you had to sign up to was one of the main things that blocked me too. I took a trip to the USA a couple of years ago and realised how useful it would be to have one. When I looked into it I saw you could buy a new phone outright much cheaper than I thought, and I also found that there were / are PAYG options available.

Because I was almost 50 before owning one I have not found using it to come easy or naturally. Getting tips on usage from other people has helped, and there are also a lot of helpful You Tube guides to using the various models of phones available. I would have been lost without those.

Now I finally have one and can use the essential features it is proving so helpful, mainly for the GPS navigation whenever I go to new places.

I don't care about potentially being tracked. Nobody has any reason to track me. I am not up to anything on those rare occasions that I do go somewhere other than my usual limited number of routine destinations.

Let us hope they die before they spend the inheritance. <joke>

Pretty well, have not had money crises in years. I did not learn about money management until I moved out on my own, no instruction or clue about how to balance a checkbook or make a budget and stick to it. I had to be taught. I even took accounting classes eventually and was employed as an accounting clerk for a managers working fund as the years went by. I think it is a skill that we can learn, if we seek out the information. Compared to my skills when I moved out of the family home at age 19 and began living "on my own" to 50 years later, right now, my skills have increased considerably. I firmly believe that budget and personal money management courses should be part of a teenager's education, whether taught by schools or loving parents/guides/caretakers, etc. It is another life skill that everybody should learn as part of becoming an independent adult.

That's good news about it being possible to have a pay-as-you-go smartphone. As for being tracked, clearly a way of avoiding that complication is to just allow it. Just that in my case I'd much rather not. It strikes me that whenever a user "upgrades" their hardware or software, more control is taken out of their hands and into the hands of others who can act in quite unscrupulous ways, unless the user goes to the trouble of figuring out how to get that control back, and even that may become impossible one day. But those who provide essential services will, I think, eventually make it impossible to access those services without the latest technology.