01
The 72-hour freeze
Nothing enters your life in under three days. Not a ban — a delay, and it kills most of them on its own.
Defeats: scarcity
Almost every purchase you regret was made in under four minutes. This is the handbook that slows those four minutes down — 10 counter-moves, 7 tools, and a 30-day tracker you actually fill in.
It isn't a budgeting book. Budgets fail for one boring reason: they try to out-discipline a system built by people with psychology degrees and a very large budget of their own. So we don't use willpower. We use counter-psychology.
Small amounts, spread out, invisible in aggregate. That's not a character flaw — it's the design working. Open your bank app, scroll the last 30 days, and put in what the unplanned things came to. Groceries, bills and rent don't count. Guess if you have to — the book has you do it properly with receipts.
Stop thinking of it as money leaving. It's your options leaving. Every unplanned €30 is a small piece of a future you can no longer afford to choose.
That five-year number is a deposit, a sabbatical, or a very good year. The handbook doesn't ask you to stop buying things — it asks that you're the one choosing.
* At €12/hour take-home. Trick 02 shows you how to work out your real rate.
There's no decision in it. That's not a metaphor — the funnel is built specifically to route around the part of you that decides. Here's the loop, and what breaks it — the numbers are the ten tricks, and they're all in the next section.
A drop, an ad, a bad day, a "you left something in your cart" email at 8:02pm. You didn't go looking. It found you.
Dopamine isn't the reward — it's the wanting. It peaks while you imagine owning the thing. Which is why the box is always a little disappointing.
Timers, low-stock counters, "3 people are viewing this." Urgency is engineered to stop you leaving the peak and thinking.
Saved card, one tap, or split into four so the pain of paying never registers. Your brain barely logs it as spending.
The spike fades in minutes. Then your brain writes a justification so you don't feel stupid: "I needed it anyway." That story is what makes it happen again next week.
Each one names the exact move being run on you, then hands you the counter-move, the sentence to say out loud, and a setup that takes under ten minutes. Left page: the trap. Right page: the escape.
Nothing enters your life in under three days. Not a ban — a delay, and it kills most of them on its own.
€40 is abstract. Four hours of your Tuesday is not. Money shuffles between mental folders; time doesn't.
Decide your number before you see theirs. A discount turns spending into an achievement — that's the trick.
A cart is a list of photos of objects in someone else's warehouse. Empty every one, every Sunday.
You can't out-discipline a 1.5-second checkout. Nobody can. So put the seconds back instead.
Four words before checkout. Half the time the answer ends the transaction on its own.
Use your track record, not your imagination. Future-you has never once cashed the cheques you write.
Decide before you see the menu. You spend €14 to dodge €4.90 shipping and file it under saving money.
The "out" happens first. The expensive part of a purchase is the six smaller ones it summons.
Thirty minutes once, then it works while you sleep. You cannot want what you never see.
The exercises are the product. Reading alone changes nothing, and you already know that from every other guide you read this year.
Tool 05 — ten pocket scripts. Say them out loud. Saying it breaks the trance, which is most of the job.
There are no testimonials on this page. Social proof is the last trick in the book, and using it here would be a bit rich. Buy it because the argument above worked on you — not because a stranger with a ring light said it changed their life.
No. It's a nothing-unplanned challenge. You still buy things — you buy them from the freeze list, on a Sunday, at full attention. There's a weekly treat built in on purpose, because total restriction is what causes the blowout on day 19.
About six weeks, run properly: two short exercises to get your baseline, ten days to install the tricks at one per day, then the 30-day reset with a five-minute review each Sunday. You don't have to wait, though — the book says you can start the tracker today and read a trick a day as you go. Both work. And if you're in a hurry, page 31 is every in-the-moment check compressed into five questions. Screenshot it and start there.
No. It's A4 and every box, line and table is built to be filled in, so it works printed with a pen or opened in any PDF app with a stylus. Only three pages ever get used up, and you can reprint those.
Not one calculation depends on the currency — only on the size of the number. Swap in pounds, dollars, złoty, whatever you spend.
Straight away. The download link appears on the confirmation page and lands in your inbox at the same time, so you can open it on a laptop and print it later. There's no account to create and nothing to install — it's a PDF.
You will, and there's a whole page for it. You log it, you find the missing switch that let it through, and you carry on from the next day — not from day one. Restarting from zero is a punishment mechanic and it's why people quit around day 19.
Your bank app, for the last 30 days of transactions. And a pen. That's the entire equipment list.
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