I know many people on the spectrum have problems with budgetting and I have tried to solve this mainly by not having any credit cards, however over the years I have had debit cards but still got into trouble.
This is because of the banks - and what I see as a practice that is there to deliberately confuse you. When you use a debit card many times the money does not come out of your account straight away - and in some instances it can take even a week. This means you can check your balance and assume you have money when in fact you don't. To me this is deliberately done by the banks in order to get you to make a mistake and spend money you haven't got, because if you do make a mistake then they can charge you and therefore make money out of that mistake.
What I don't understand is that surely they have the technology to update the account immediately after a transaction. I can't think of any other reason why they don't apart from it being to try to hoodwink you.
Sometimes I may have for example £150 in my account and I pay for something, then 4 or 5 days later I check my balance and theres £50 so I take it out for something else only for the next day to see a balance of -£42. Sometimes I just lose track, now I don't even know if I have £88 or if the money was taken out for somethings I bought last week. Sometimes transactions don't even come up on the statement for a week but the money gets taken out and sometimes they come up on the statement immediately but the money doesn't get taken out for a week.
This just has to be deliberate because if they money was deducted immediately and came up one the statement immediately then the bank would no doubt end up losing a lot of money every week that's brought in by people making mistakes.
Does anyone else have these problems or can anyone recommend a debit card that really does not let you spend money you don't have ?
