When and how did you find your way out of survival mode (altogether or in-part)?

For an example: I had an issue with always being in a food-scarce state, where I basically needed to hit the grocery store everyday buying overpriced under-portioned stuff and spending a fortune to have basically nothing in the cupboards and fridge or being depressed I had no supplies and just ordering food.

I broke down and decided I needed to get and start using my Costco membership and that I could have whatever I wanted as long as I put every item down in a spreadsheet type doc and came up with a rough estimate for how many of each I needed each month and factored tax i to the multiplyer so I could adjust and always have the total cost for everything that would be my groceries.

But I took it even further and now every subscription, bill, discretionary and vices, and more expensive longer-term items all get roughly budgeted for based on their lifecycle. So an annual subscription I anticipate keeping gets saved for out of each paycheck, something that lasts 2 months gets amortized over 4 paychecks generally.

Everything is overbudgeted and real liberal so even if I don't have that expense that month or ever and its out of date, I still end up benefitting by saving for it and now I anticipate slowly transitioning all my monthly subs I cant yet afford annual and paying more for towards once a year with a discount and it not littering my records with the need for monthly entries.

Now all my accounts except savings $0 out at the end exactly each month so it will be immediately obvious what the surplus is and what I am able to save, and also leverage that towards further optimizations as the opportunity arises.

Its like a complete paradigm shift for me and I think I've stumbled on to my new groove haha. Its also forced me to be realistic and realize I can't save money when I'm not planning for the actual human needs and factors involved. Savings cannot be an the expense of my physical and material well-being, I will not tolerate that long term without sabatoging myself

[Knock-on benefits]

• budget for expensive bag of catfood per month and cat litter but won't go through nearly that much so that can become an adhoc cat medical insurance/vet visit/medical and supply fund + my emergency medical fund 😅
• can subtly tweak the quantities to allow accumulation of supplies without severe effect or detriment of the general budget. It will almost certainly be covered by other items not requiring replenishment
• since larger over-time expenses rarely overlap, can use the savings to apply to pressing needs or unexpected emergencies without ever really having an impact since they will have been covered several times over by redundancies created by savings for other expenses that are similarly ongoing