This Is How to Make a Budget You’ll Actually Stick With

Latasha Jordan’s favorite budgeting tool is a blank sheet of paper.

The 39-year-old from Durham, N.C., folds the page into three sections twice, an act of organizational origami she refined over the past decade. The folds create enough boxes to fill in nine months of income, expenses, debt and savings by hand. A budgeting app could save her hours and effort, but she insists that the drudgery of doing it herself is what makes it actually work.