A more durable approach starts with tracking, not restricting: spend a month simply recording where money actually goes, without trying to change anything yet. This reveals the real baseline — often surprising, since categories like eating out, subscriptions, or small frequent purchases tend to be underestimated when people budget from memory rather than data.
From there, build the budget around that real baseline with deliberate, small adjustments rather than a dramatic overhaul, since dramatic cuts are exactly what most people abandon within a few weeks. Building in an explicit 'miscellaneous' or buffer category — rather than pretending every rupee will go exactly to plan — also makes a budget far more likely to survive contact with an actual month, which always has a few things a template didn't anticipate.
The goal of a budget isn't perfect prediction; it's enough visibility to catch when spending drifts meaningfully off track, early enough to course-correct before it becomes a pattern.