Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Trouble sticking to a budget when using credit cards for day to day transactions?
The trick to using a credit card responsibly is accounting. With your old system, you were paying for everything out of your savings account.  Everytime you had an expense, it was immediately withdrawn from your savings account, and you saw how much money you had left. Now, with a credit card, there isn't any money being withdrawn from your savings account until a month later, when you have a huge credit card bill. The trick is to treat every credit card transaction as if it was a debit card transaction, and subtract the money from your "available funds" on paper immediately.  Then you'll know how much money you actually have to spend (not by looking at your bank statement, but by looking at your "available funds" number), and when the credit card bill comes, you'll have money sitting there waiting to go to the credit card company. This requires more work than you had with your old system, and if it sounds like too much work, you might be better off with a debit card or cash.  But if you want to continue to use the credit card, you'll find that the right software will make the accounting process easier.  I like YNAB, but there are other software products that work as well.  Just make sure that your system accounts for each credit card transaction as it is spent, deducting the amount from your budget now, so that there is money set aside for the credit card bill.  Software that simply categorizes your spending after the fact is not as useful.