I recently wanted to keep track of my income and expenses, in a cost-sensitive way. I am not very good at treating money as a real object, and very few people are good at valuing an expense appropriately. I'd been having some financial difficulties as a result, so I wanted to be able to reason about what to cut or reallocate in a sensible way. For me, sensible means using intuition instead of hard rules like a computer program.
I took several sheets of grid paper and taped put them together. Using colored markers, I drew in my expenses. If I spent $50 at the grocery store, I would make a blue box that surrounded 50 squares on the grid paper, and label it "Groceries". I color-coded the expenses, but this is optional. I left some white squares representing my savings. I had a whole empty sheet where I could pencil in incoming money as I worked an hourly job to motivate myself (I work from home and need to self-motivate). I realized certain things were a bigger deal than I thought, and other expenses I didn't need to fret about as much as I had been. I think humans are intuitively better at visualizing than dealing with numbers. My main tips for this project are to use a felt-tip marker so the lines really stand out, and to do it by hand instead of computer, so nothing moves around on a "redraw" and you learn the contents as you make it. Also, I used a scale of $1=1 square, but if you have a lot more/less money than me you could use a different scale or omit savings.
I plan to start life-logging and reviewing the use of my time the same way, which is my other exchangable, limited resource, and which I manage even less well.
Surely some people can better apply intuition to regular numbers? I actually just tried this graphing method and it didn't do anything for me at all. I actually caught myself trying to divide the ratio of area back into numbers.
I've never needed more than a text document for working these things out... and only if there is more information than I can keep track of in my head. For example, if I'm considering purchasing a $100 pair of jeans I might weigh the value against, say, 13 ribeyes, or opportunity cost of 5 hours at work.
I also keep a loose running estimate of expenditures to ensure I have a surplus over any period longer than a few weeks.
I've got a friend that used to express value in terms of the equivalent cost in burritos; if he was considering spending $20 on a new album, for example, he'd try to estimate whether he'd get more or less enjoyment out of it than getting four meals out of the nearest taco truck.
It worked pretty well for small to middling values but ran into scaling issues with large ones: a new computer system, for example, was intuitively incommensurate with five hundred burritos. Differing rates of hedonic depreciation also turned out to be a problem: a T-shirt was in the same economic ballpark as a burrito, but its hedonic value was spread out over one or two years rather than twenty delicious minutes of beans and lard.