Kakeibo is more than a technique for a budgeting method. It is a financial philosophy also that is centered on mindful, deliberate spending, and also saving. This technique might sound lofty, but the kakeibo approach is super simple for practicing and tailor to people’s lifestyles.
Kakeibo technique for budgeting gets its name commonly from a Japanese term that means financial ledger for the household. So essentially, a kakeibo is a physical technique for budgeting a journal. First, users need to answer some of their financial questions and set up their respective savings goals.
Then they might track their expenses and put down their purchases according to categories and the review for costs at the end of the month.
The process also resembles a lot with the budgeting apps like PocketSmith and even Digit. But there are no specific downloads, bank account links, or even the regular notifications updating with kakeibo that is just as good as the old-fashioned for record-keeping.
More importantly, kakeibo is also designed to help users think about their relationship with money and understand why they make their purchases. When any user can spend hundreds of dollars by clicking a few buttons on Amazon, they might appreciate this as a reminder to slow them down. Both PocketSmith and Digit use this technology to monitor spending habits and make up the suggestions so that they can come in handy, too. Hence, they run out on autopilot once the users go through the initial setup.
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Where did kakeibo approach started?
While the kakeibo technique for budgeting is still new in the United States as it’s a common tradition in Japan, the most famous Japanese journalist Hani Motoko wrote about the method in a 1904 women’s magazine.
The kakeibo accounting system appealed to her readers, Japanese housewives in charge of their household budgets. The writer Fumiko Chiba has published the guide of “Kakeibo: The Japanese Art of Saving Money” in 2018 for the trend that took off during the West. According to Chiba and many other experts, kakeibo reflects the Japanese cultural beliefs about the importance of saving money.
Cash plays a ceremonial role

Children receive money as a holiday gift, and they’re encouraged to hold onto the money for purchases that are worth it. Adults for this technique don’t take money lightly either. Compared with other countries, Japan has a cash-heavy economy; credit cards, which enable frequent, big-ticket spending, aren’t swiped nearly as often as elsewhere.
Approach for kakeibo
- Get a home ledger- Kakeibo technique stays true to its roots as in early 20th-century Japan. It thus requires physical handwriting. Bullet journals for this technique also work well, but any notebook (or handwritten system you can keep track of) will do just fine.
- Calculating the monthly income and thus subtracting the fixed expenses – the users can cheat and use an online calculator as an alternative for this step.
- Set a savings goal for the month ideally, the plan amounts will come from the income for the leftover after fixed expenses like the rent or mortgage and all the utilities.
Kakeibo Vs. other budgeting systems
The users have found that kakeibo is keeping exceptional for more than the other budgeting systems that have tried to consider the motivations behind their spending.
One more thing, kakeibo users must have written down the budget items by hand in real-time. According to some studies, handwriting also improves their memory, and it is a meditative, reflective process. Writing down the details of purchase takes longer than plugging numbers into a computer or phone.
On some level, the users have more awareness of what the user has written and why. Kakeibo could be adapted for a screen or software program if physical handwriting is challenging for the users. The thought process for this technique is the essential part.
Kakeibo’s category has a system that makes you give every purchase a second look. The users could not automate any part of the process that they might, for example, enter any recurring expenses into an electronic budgeting app and then put them out of my mind. Instead, the users had a chance to think about how all their spending reflected the values and priorities.
As a result, when the users did decide to buy something in the “wants” or “culture” column, they were more confident about making an intelligent choice, not an impulse purchase.
How can kakeibo help users to save money?

Kakeibo keeps the user’s savings goals front and center. But, like “spare change” apps like Stash and Acorns, the kakeibo approach also helps the users save some cash little by little in a sustainable way over the long term.
Setting up for a savings amount the users knew that they could achieve was empowering. And kakeibo is specially designed for long-term financial planning as the four questions required all the users to think about my future goals. Like any sound budgeting system, kakeibo helps them to prepare for their future without feeling deprived or panicked in the present.

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Kakeibo: The Japanese Budget Technique
Kakeibo is more than a technique for a budgeting method. It is a financial philosophy also that is centered on mindful, deliberate spending, and also saving. This technique might sound lofty, but the kakeibo approach is super simple for practicing