Practical tips and ideas for easy budget control and smarter spending online.
These days, shopping and entertainment are more accessible than ever. With one click, you can buy what you need and start enjoying it. But with the great advantages of shopping from the comfort of your couch, there come also challenges. For example, budget control. Keeping an overview of your online spending isn’t easy. Especially if you’re doing it for your whole household and kids.
If you’re struggling to stay on top of your expenses, you’re not alone. You might have already tried different tools – e.g. expense tracker apps, or stricter pocket money policies at home. There are many good solutions out there to match any situation.
We’re not financial advisors (and we don’t want to be), but we do know a thing or two about online spending. So if you need some more ideas for better online budget control, here are some.
Budget control for couples and households
What’s the least romantic thing about marriage? Money talk. If you have a shared bank account with your spouse and different approaches to spending the money on it, that can lead to unpleasant conversations. It would be a pity to let the cost of living together cost you the relationship itself. Instead, there are some ways to handle your household costs in a smarter way..
- Reconsider Service Subscriptions
Any household budget could benefit from flexibility. One thing that can strain the family budget are recurring costs, especially for non-essential goods or services. If you have a difficult month or your financial situation changes, you don’t want to keep paying for subscriptions.
Instead, it would be a good idea to have the flexibility to start and stop using a service as you please. With subscriptions, this isn’t always easy or quick. And once you want to come back to using the service, you’d have to start your subscription all over again. This is where switching from subscription to prepaid can help.
You may not be aware of this, but using your favourite entertainment and streaming services, like Netflix or Spotify can be done by means of a prepaid code. It’s simple – you buy a digital code that covers the subscription costs for 1, 3, 6 or 12 months. When this period ends, your access to the platform also ends. You can decide whether you renew with a new code, or you give it a break for a few months and come back later. No cancellation is necessary, and there are no automatic renewals. That gives your household a solid advantage in budget control, without depriving you of your entertainment.
- Determine in Advance How You Will Spend Your Money
Another common tension point for couples is having no funds left at the end of the month for things you intended to buy. One way to avoid this is by dedicating budget for a specific purpose at the beginning of the month.
Let’s say you want to get a new piece of decoration for your household this month without spending more than EUR 100 on it. In that case, you could buy a EUR 100 at the beginning of the month and dedicate it to decoration. In this way, your decoration budget is reserved, and you don’t have to worry about having any money left at the end of the month. That helps keep the peace at home, too.
Kids, pocket money, and budget control
When your kids start getting their pocket money, that’s an exciting milestone. Another one is when they start spending money online. That’s where you might come head to head with how difficult it is to track your child’s spending online. Here’s what might help with budget control.
- Turn Pocket Money Into Prepaid Value
One way to help your children learn responsible spending and budget control is to predetermine what they spend money on and how much. You can do that by getting them prepaid credit instead of giving them cash.
For example, if your kid is a Roblox fan, get them a . They can only spend what’s on the gift card and they can only spend it on the game. You can do the same with all other games, or subscription-based services, such as Spotify, Netflix, PlayStation, Xbox, Steam, or Nintendo.
The upside of this approach is that you allow your kids the opportunity to use online services without having to create a bank account for them, or give them access to your credit card.
Personal Budget Control
Even if you’re only responsible for your own finances, budget control can still be challenging. And you’re probably often wondering how to stop spending money you don’t really have. We all know the feeling of excitement after payday when that EUR 200 pair of jeans seems very affordable, only for reality to sink in a few days later, leaving you fashionable but low on funds.
There are many ways in which you can try to minimise your chance of overspending. One possibility is by using prepaid credit for your shopping needs. You could do that by, for example, allocating your desired shopping budget to a Zalando gift card, and only shopping with that as a payment method.
Not a Zalando fan? Or, not a clothes shopping fan? You can take a similar approach without restricting yourself to one shop. For example, by purchasing a prepaid credit card.
A prepaid credit card is practically prepaid money – you pay and you get a code that represents the amount you paid. You can then use this code to pay on any of the prepaid card’s partner websites. These can be shopping websites, but also sports betting, online gaming, or telecommunications websites. That’s useful if you want to keep your sports betting or online gaming expenses in check.
Whatever the area you want to practice budget control in, there’s a prepaid credit card for that. Check out the partner websites for paysafecard, Neosurf, TicketPremium, CASHlib, Crypto Voucher and CASHU to find what fits your situation best. Or get a BITSA prepaid card, which can be used offline and online. Whichever you choose, you can only spend the amount you’ve prepaid. That makes it more difficult to give into the splurging impulse.
Related Products
paysafecard 
Zalando 
BITSA Prepaid Value is (Almost) Forever
If managing your personal, household or kids’ budget via prepaid value sounds interesting to you, here’s another consideration. Almost all prepaid digital codes are valid indefinitely. There are a few exceptions which must be used within 6 months or a year. However, the majority will be available for you for as long as you need them.
So, if you have some money you want to dedicate to a certain purpose, you can use it to buy your prepaid code now and only redeem or activate the code at a later point. This approach is similar to keeping money in a savings account, only in the case of prepaid value, you’re already pre-deciding what it will be used for. This can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on your situation. But in either case, it’s an option worth knowing about.
Ready to Try a New Approach With Your Finances?
Start exploring the numerous forms in which prepaid value comes – we have everything from entertainment to gaming gift cards, as well as mobile top-up and prepaid credit cards.
Please note: This article was not written in cooperation with aforementioned parties. The terms and conditions of the product apply to the products purchased through our platforms.
