A useful budget makes room for the life you actually live.

Budgets fail when they describe an improved person rather than the one filling them in. Every category is set to the disciplined version of you, with no line for the coffee, the taxi at the end of a long day, the birthday you forgot. Then the first ordinary week breaks it and the whole thing gets abandoned as further evidence of failure.

Look at what you actually spent recently and give the recurring small things a named place. Cut somewhere you genuinely do not care about instead. A budget you can keep beats a stricter one you cannot.