The bad news for anyone whose budget is struggling to keep up with rising prices is that inflation is not yet starting to cool.

While things appeared to be moving in the right direction in April, May inflation spiked again; the consumer price index (CPI) rose 1.0% to a year-over-year high of 8.6%.

“Inflation is over 8% right now so everything is more expensive,” said personal finance expert and “Crawl Before You Ball” author Buffie Purselle.

Write It Down and Visualize It’s hard to imagine that there’s a personal finance expert on Earth who advises against creating a budget and a household spending plan, but they usually say to pick the app or software that works best for you.

If you take Fischer’s advice and write your budget out by hand, you’ll probably notice that you’re writing some variation of the same thing over and over and over again. “Get rid of those eight or nine different subscriptions,” Purselle said.

Interest rates are rising, which makes money more expensive to borrow, but it’s probably safe to say that your savings account yield has barely ticked up only a little, if at all. The good news is that you can move your money to savings vehicles designed with inflation in mind.

If you don’t have a big family, you might have gotten used to shopping without a strategy, but with inflation still over 8%, a lack of planning is a luxury you can no longer afford.

“Use a tool such as Commute Cost Calculator to see what your trip to work costs every month or year, and how much a few changes could save,” said Tanya Peterson, a consumer finance expert with Freedom Financial Network.