Want to be RICHER? All you need is a notebook and a pen!

That’s the ingeniously simple idea behind a book taking the world by storm. So could it help FLIC EVERETT?

Saving money is a talent some people have naturally, while others, like me, just don’t. no matter how many budgeting apps and online banking passwords we amass, we are financial sieves, sprinkling a trail of random, spontaneous spending behind us.

So imagine the joy of discovering a simple method of money management — one that means painlessly saving around 35 per cent more each month and never again feeling that swoop of fear when you check your balance at the cashpoint.

and although this Japanese method is fast becoming a trend to rival Marie Kondo’s Life-Changing Magic of Tidying, it requires nothing more than a notebook and pen.

The Kakeibo (pronounced kah-keh-boh) is a Japanese financial planning journal. it was invented in 1904, so it’s hardly a new trick, but with ‘journaling’ a hot craze right now (basically, writing ordered lists of what you plan to achieve, and crossing them off) the time is right for this simple, old-school approach, newly packaged to capture the modern imagination.

i tried it for a week and was grimly fascinated to discover just how much i thoughtlessly spend downloading Kindle books. (i only have to read a tweet about a new thriller and i’m clicking through to amazon — a swift check revealed i spent £45 on ‘cheap’ Kindle books last month.)

Then there are the vast amounts i blow on trains to see my family — a monthly visit from Scotland to Manchester is at least £80 on the train. Then there’s my spending on Ubers while in Manchester (£50 during my last visit), and the frankly distressing weekly food shopping budget (£100) for me and my partner. i’m vegan, he isn’t, which means two almost entirely separate shops.

Thenthere’s my love of the local deli’s expensive but delicious olive selection and his liking for decent red wine.

i’d hardly describe myself as a high-roller — i buy most of my clothes in charity shops and haven’t had a holiday in two years — but, clearly, there are serious savings to be made.

Of course, you could simply use a ledger and note it all down like some Dickensian clerk. But the Kakeibo’s latest incarnation, by Fumiko Chiba, contains not only a set of pages with boxes and dotted lines to fill in all your weekly and monthly spending, but inspirational quotes such as ‘even monkeys fall from trees … don’t be disheartened, we all make mistakes’ and ‘Spilled water does not return to the tray — once spent, your money will not come back!’ Quite.

The idea is simple. at the start of each month, you sit down with your Kakeibo and ‘think mindfully’ about what you need to save, and the things you need to do to reach your goal.

Then you write down your weekly spend, so you can look back over the weeks and months to see where you’re going wrong — and right.

‘The simple act of completing your Kakeibo ensures that saving is a part of your everyday life,’ says the author, encouragingly, in the introduction.

it may be part of daily life in Japan, but in the West, we’re just beginning to see the value of domestic accounting again, after years of mindless spending on credit cards.

Mindfulness is key to Kakeibo: the idea is to focus on saving as a pleasure, not a chore, and to enjoy seeing your unspent money totting up as you fill in the pages.

Users ask themselves four key questions.

how much money do you have available? how much do you want to save? how much are you spending? how can you improve? ‘available’ means what’s left after deducting fixed expenses like mortgage, bills and travel. The week i tried it, the month had started and all my bills had just whooshed out by direct debit, leaving me with around £400, once i’d accounted for food. You then set a weekly or monthly saving target and use it to work out your weekly spending limit.

Writing everything down means you’re always on top of what’s going out, and ‘how can you improve?’ is answered by tracking your progress at the end of each month to see where it’s all gone (Books, wine, books, wine…).

The difficult bit is remembering to write down every single thing you spend — each Caffe nero latte, every random eBay whim, that emergency oat bar when you bought petrol.

But rather than use an app, which might be easier than toting a large journal, the ‘mindfulness’ factor means the act of writing down each new cost makes you think much more about it — a bit like writing out revision notes.

it’s true, it does. and it marginally erodes the pleasure of spontaneous spending when you know that paperback you’ll probably never read (£12.99) or on-sale scarf you’ll never wear (£8) must be indelibly inscribed into the ledger.

PUrChaSeSmust all be assigned to a category. Traditionally, the four Kakeibo categories are Survival (food and necessities); Optional (restaurant meals, new shoes and drinks with friends); Culture (cinema, concerts); and extras (holidays or gifts).

it’s fine, however, to design your own categories, such as ‘grandchildren’ or ‘interior décor’, depending on your life stage. The key is to assign every purchase a section, then be scrupulous about recording it.

The trouble is, i soon discovered, one person’s ‘ necessities’ are another’s luxuries. While i never go to the theatre, i’d struggle without the local cinema. and is netflix ‘culture’ or ‘optional’ or even ‘survival’ when i haven’t yet completed Series 2 of The Crown?

it seems the categories have to

be a moveable feast and part of the fun is choosing what you can and can’t live without. I decide that I can’t cope without my fancy vegan cheese, but I can live without takeaway teas.

Once you’ve got to grips with daily accounting, you can move on to the next stage: using cash, not credit.

A recent study found that people spend more when they’re paying with a credit card. Using cash makes us more likely to pay attention to the cost and to value the purchase more. Researchers at the University of Toronto found that when people bought items with cash, they valued them almost twice as highly as those who had paid with plastic.

The Kakeibo method recommends an envelope system. Your monthly cash goes into different envelopes and each can only be spent on its own category. Once it’s gone, you can’t borrow from another envelope.

After food, I divided my cash into £100 for transport, which is also a necessity so counts as ‘survival’; £100 for ‘optional’; £50 for ‘culture’; and £150 for ‘extras. The remaining money goes into savings.

Immediately, I had to pay for a pair of eBay shoes, which, once postage was added, came to £24.99. At the time they were a bargain, but suddenly my weekly ‘optional’ budget is gone. That means no more Kindle books and I’m forced to rely on all the unread books on my shelves, which turns out to be quite a library. MUCH

worse is ‘extras.’ I suddenly can’t afford to meet friends for dinner if I want to save for a week away in the summer, and under the rules of Kakeibo I’m not allowed to plunder the ‘culture’ envelope, even though I’d happily skip a couple of movies.

Initially, it all seems a bit like a never-ending accounting session, combined with a major fun bypass.

But that’s not the idea at all, insists the author. The people who are ‘bad with money’ are, apparently, those who will benefit most significantly.

‘A kakeibo is all about removing fear and turning budgeting into something you can enjoy,’ says Chiba. ‘So many of us have a moment of dread before looking at our bank balance, either because we don’t know what to expect or because we know we won’t like what we see!’

And it’s not about deprivation: ‘saving money is about spending money well.’ Generally, when we consider saving, it’s easy to focus on what we can’t have. This makes it arduous. Instead, the focus should be on stopping wasteful, random spending.

Chiba’s most important tip is to divide spending into ‘musts’ and ‘wants’. I must have food, but I don’t actually need artichokes in a fancy jar — or the eBay shoes. I just want them.

Like most appealing Japanese trends, it’s all about ritual. Being forced to work in a certain order, to focus on saving and to spend only what’s in your envelope, is restrictive but hugely instructive.

As I get more familiar with my incomings and outgoings, I’ll put less in the ‘culture’ envelope, more in ‘extras’, and be a lot more careful about one-click online ordering.

It’s surprisingly eye-opening for such a simple, old-fashioned method of money management.

And having to write that I bought ‘three new books while I waited for a train, a tea I drank only half of from Starbucks, a new bag just because Accessorize had a sale on and I was passing …’ well, that’s enough to pull anyone up short — even me.

Who knew the key to a burgeoning bank balance was a pen, paper — and a feeling of mild personal shame?