Accounting for your transactions and watching a tight balance are two entirely separate activities, as different as day and night. One involves checking a list

Accounting for your transactions and watching a tight balance are two entirely separate activities, as different as day and night. One involves checking a list / notifications for fraud and the occasional exercise of self-control to stay within a reasonable budget. Easy peasy. The other involves frequent constraint solving and optimization, which explode in complexity as budgets get tighter and constraints get harder. The latency built into modern tooling exacerbates the issue. Credit card apps, mint, etc are decent for accounting (or allow export to an app that is), but they are so bad for dealing with a tight budget that people resort to debit cards and hand-ledgers (under which I am including manual entry of amounts into an app). A sizable safety margin lets you tolerate latency and gives you access to modern, low-overhead, highly capable tooling. Also, the luxury of choosing your own budgets lets you dodge tons of constraint solving right off the bat. > Stochastically speaking, many of us--including myself--come from humble beginnings. Then surely you remember the massive cognitive unloading that came when you first built a safety margin, yes? Even putting all of the above aside, I just don't have much faith in patronizing and finger-wagging as tools for social progress. Even if responsibly consuming credit were trivial at all income levels, I still would still object to business models that encouraged and monetized irresponsibility.