Why Someone in Their 3rd Year of Living Alone Should Delete All Delivery and Shopping Apps from Their Smartphone

Living a life where less than 100,000 KRW remains in your bank account after paying fixed expenses and living costs every month is incredibly draining. This is a common situation faced by single-household office workers within their first three years of living independently, who earn between 3 million and 4 million KRW per month. While YouTube advocates for the "zero-spending challenge"—starving yourself and spending absolutely nothing—honestly, that is an impossible mission that only leads to binge eating after a few days. The problem is not your willpower, but your smartphone environment, where everything is resolved with a single click of a payment button. Instead of blaming your fingers for choosing delivery food and calling taxis late at night while lying down, you need to set up annoying obstacles along the path where your money flows out. Just by properly designing physical barriers, you can easily keep 300,000 KRW in your bank account every month.

Designing Smartphone Friction to Prevent Impulse Buying

Humans give up on spending as the payment process becomes more annoying. Since simple payments have erased the pain of spending, we must artificially restore that pain. This is a method of fiercely tangling the payment steps so that the brain perceives the reality of spending money.

Disconnect all simple payment cards, such as Naver Pay and Kakao Pay, from your smartphone. Completely delete the Coupang and Baemin (Baedal Minjeok) apps as well. From now on, when you buy things, make yourself open a mobile web browser, manually enter the address to log in, and type in the 16-digit card number by hand. There are far fewer items you would buy if you had to endure this tedious process.
Write down 3 items on your smartphone's default memo app as your "Immediate Purchase Ban List." These are small kitchen appliances like air fryers or mini blenders, fast fashion clothing that is easily bought because it is cheap, and character merchandise that easily becomes cute trash. For items falling into these three categories, you must cross-check them with your memo before opening the payment window.
If you have placed items in your shopping cart, throw your smartphone aside and walk out of the room before pressing the pay button. Go outside and walk or pace in place for exactly 10 minutes. Once 10 minutes pass, the dopamine in your brain will miraculously subside, and the thirst to absolutely buy it will disappear.

By setting up these three defensive walls, you will immediately save more than 150,000 KRW from the micro-payments you used to make unconsciously every month.

The 10% Time-Buying Formula to Prevent Spite Spending

You have probably experienced losing an entire weekend to piled-up cleaning and laundry. Entering Monday without having relieved your fatigue leads to ordering delivery food and taking taxis during the week due to a compensatory psychology built up over those days. Outsourcing household chores is not a luxury, but a defensive investment to maintain your spending control on weekdays. According to a 2017 study by Professor Ashley Whillans of Harvard Business School, people who spent money on time-saving services like cleaning or cooking had significantly higher life satisfaction than those who spent money on material possessions.

I propose a formula to set aside exactly 10% of your after-tax monthly income as a "Time-Buying Budget." If your after-tax income is 3.5 million KRW, use 350,000 KRW every month solely to make your body comfortable according to the formula below.

T_{budget} = I_{net} \times 0.10

Using the secured budget, sign up for a single-household specialized cleaning service (about 35,000 KRW for two visits a month) and purchase a subscription for a laundry pickup and delivery service (about 90,000 KRW per month). On days when you are bone-tired after working overtime, take a taxi home without feeling guilty.
Spend the weekend time secured through outsourcing household chores entirely on resting. If you abuse your body by trying to do a side hustle or studying during this time, you will go back to square one. While the cleaning service tidies up your home, lie down quietly to sleep or read a book to calm your nervous system.

If you rest well over the weekend and recharge your physical strength, the cost of ordering delivery food out of anger and spontaneous spite spending on your way home from work on weekdays will decrease noticeably. A virtuous cycle occurs where you enjoy more than 4 hours of complete freedom every week while also protecting your balance.

A Prepaid System to Protect Both Your Wallet and Relationships

The reason 70,000 to 80,000 KRW is blown on a single social gathering is because of unplanned second and third rounds of drinks. Card swipes made gallantly while heavily intoxicated return as a terrible headache the next morning. To prevent this excessive spending on the day of the gathering, you need a system that locks down the costs a month in advance.

Before the 20th of each month, confirm the dates of your gatherings for the next month on your calendar. If plans are set in advance, the probability of spending money by getting swept up in sudden, unannounced get-togethers decreases.
When choosing a place, open a reservation platform like Catch Table and pay the restaurant deposit or meal cost entirely in advance. It is also good to pre-book museum exhibition tickets or one-day classes to prepay the costs. Thanks to the psychological barrier created by the fact that you have already paid, you can naturally tone down the lavish atmosphere that leads to a second round on that day.
Share the reservation in your group chat to draw a line. Mention directly, "Since I prepaid for the food and exhibition this time, let's meet up light with just about 10,000 KRW per person for cafe drinks on the day of." Since your friends' budgets are also clear, they will feel comfortable because they don't have to play exhausting mind games over spending.

By locking down gathering expenses in advance, you can have a great time every time you meet while dropping the average spending per gathering significantly from the previous 70,000 KRW level to the 45,000 KRW level.

Financial Changes After Applying Expenditure Control

Saving by holding back with willpower eventually brings a yo-yo effect. Instead of obsessively locking away money, changing the system of how money flows lasts much longer. The quantitative changes that appear when you implement the introduced methods for a month are shown in the table below.

Evaluation Metric	Before Application	After Application	Monthly Change
Average Monthly Surplus Funds	Less than 50,000 KRW	350,000 KRW or more	+300,000 KRW
Weekly Free Time	2 hours (Chore fatigue)	6 hours (Rest secured)	+4 hours
Monthly Impulse Purchases	8 times or more	2 times or less	-6 times
Average Spend Per Gathering	70,000 KRW	45,000 KRW	-25,000 KRW

Securing 300,000 KRW of surplus funds every month is simpler than you think. On your way home from work today, start by deleting all the simple payment cards installed on your smartphone. Your body might become a little more inconvenienced, but your bank account will surely get thicker.

Why Someone in Their 3rd Year of Living Alone Should Delete All Delivery and Shopping Apps from Their Smartphone

Designing Smartphone Friction to Prevent Impulse Buying

Disconnect all simple payment cards, such as Naver Pay and Kakao Pay, from your smartphone. Completely delete the Coupang and Baemin (Baedal Minjeok) apps as well. From now on, when you buy things, make yourself open a mobile web browser, manually enter the address to log in, and type in the 16-digit card number by hand. There are far fewer items you would buy if you had to endure this tedious process.
Write down 3 items on your smartphone's default memo app as your "Immediate Purchase Ban List." These are small kitchen appliances like air fryers or mini blenders, fast fashion clothing that is easily bought because it is cheap, and character merchandise that easily becomes cute trash. For items falling into these three categories, you must cross-check them with your memo before opening the payment window.
If you have placed items in your shopping cart, throw your smartphone aside and walk out of the room before pressing the pay button. Go outside and walk or pace in place for exactly 10 minutes. Once 10 minutes pass, the dopamine in your brain will miraculously subside, and the thirst to absolutely buy it will disappear.

By setting up these three defensive walls, you will immediately save more than 150,000 KRW from the micro-payments you used to make unconsciously every month.

The 10% Time-Buying Formula to Prevent Spite Spending

T_{budget} = I_{net} \times 0.10

Using the secured budget, sign up for a single-household specialized cleaning service (about 35,000 KRW for two visits a month) and purchase a subscription for a laundry pickup and delivery service (about 90,000 KRW per month). On days when you are bone-tired after working overtime, take a taxi home without feeling guilty.
Spend the weekend time secured through outsourcing household chores entirely on resting. If you abuse your body by trying to do a side hustle or studying during this time, you will go back to square one. While the cleaning service tidies up your home, lie down quietly to sleep or read a book to calm your nervous system.

A Prepaid System to Protect Both Your Wallet and Relationships

Before the 20th of each month, confirm the dates of your gatherings for the next month on your calendar. If plans are set in advance, the probability of spending money by getting swept up in sudden, unannounced get-togethers decreases.
When choosing a place, open a reservation platform like Catch Table and pay the restaurant deposit or meal cost entirely in advance. It is also good to pre-book museum exhibition tickets or one-day classes to prepay the costs. Thanks to the psychological barrier created by the fact that you have already paid, you can naturally tone down the lavish atmosphere that leads to a second round on that day.
Share the reservation in your group chat to draw a line. Mention directly, "Since I prepaid for the food and exhibition this time, let's meet up light with just about 10,000 KRW per person for cafe drinks on the day of." Since your friends' budgets are also clear, they will feel comfortable because they don't have to play exhausting mind games over spending.

Financial Changes After Applying Expenditure Control

Evaluation Metric	Before Application	After Application	Monthly Change
Average Monthly Surplus Funds	Less than 50,000 KRW	350,000 KRW or more	+300,000 KRW
Weekly Free Time	2 hours (Chore fatigue)	6 hours (Rest secured)	+4 hours
Monthly Impulse Purchases	8 times or more	2 times or less	-6 times
Average Spend Per Gathering	70,000 KRW	45,000 KRW	-25,000 KRW

Why Someone in Their 3rd Year of Living Alone Should Delete All Delivery and Shopping Apps from Their Smartphone

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Why Someone in Their 3rd Year of Living Alone Should Delete All Delivery and Shopping Apps from Their Smartphone

Designing Smartphone Friction to Prevent Impulse Buying

The 10% Time-Buying Formula to Prevent Spite Spending

A Prepaid System to Protect Both Your Wallet and Relationships

Financial Changes After Applying Expenditure Control

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Why Someone in Their 3rd Year of Living Alone Should Delete All Delivery and Shopping Apps from Their Smartphone

Designing Smartphone Friction to Prevent Impulse Buying

The 10% Time-Buying Formula to Prevent Spite Spending

A Prepaid System to Protect Both Your Wallet and Relationships

Financial Changes After Applying Expenditure Control