Why most Sri Lankans don't know where their salary goes

Salary hits the account on the 25th. By the 10th of next month, half of it is gone. Sound familiar?

Most Sri Lankans have no idea where their money actually goes between those two dates. Not because they're careless — but because nobody taught us to pay attention.

The "I manage fine" trap

Here's what managing money looks like for most of us: salary comes in, rent and bills go out, we spend on food and transport, and whatever's left over is "savings." If the balance isn't zero by month-end, we assume we're doing okay.

But "okay" isn't a number. It's a feeling. And feelings don't tell you that you spent Rs. 20,000 on Uber Eats last month, or Rs. 8,000 on evening kottu runs, or Rs. 12,000 on subscriptions you forgot you had.

Why manual tracking doesn't stick

You've probably tried. Maybe you downloaded a budgeting app, started logging expenses, kept it up for four days, and then forgot to log that tuk ride to office and the whole thing fell apart.

Manual tracking fails because it depends entirely on you remembering to do it every single time. One missed entry creates a gap. A few gaps and you stop trusting the data. Once you stop trusting it, you stop logging. We've all been there.

What actually works: letting your bank do the tracking for you

Every time you spend money through a Sri Lankan bank account, you get an SMS. A debit notification with the amount, the merchant, and your remaining balance. That SMS is already doing half the work — you're just not capturing it.

An automated money manager, like Kiwi Money, works by reading these bank SMS messages and turning them into organized, categorized records of your spending. No manual entry. No forgetting. Every transaction your bank already tells you about gets logged automatically.

This means at the end of any week or month, you have a complete picture — not one built on memory, but one built on actual bank data.

What changes when you can see everything

When your spending is tracked automatically, patterns show up fast. You notice that your daily PickMe rides add up to Rs. 15,000 a month. You see that "small" weekend outings are costing Rs. 10,000+. You realize your Keells and Cargills runs are double what you assumed.

None of this requires budgeting. You don't need to set limits or create categories or follow a system. Just seeing the numbers changes your behavior. Your brain does the rest.

Awareness before everything else

Before you think about budgeting, investing, or managing debt — you need to know where your money goes. That's the foundation everything else is built on.

And the easiest way to build that foundation? Stop trying to track it yourself. Let an automated expense tracker like Kiwi Money handle it so you can focus on what the data is telling you.

That's when your money starts making sense.