MUMBAI, July 8 -- "Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship." Benjamin Franklin reportedly said this nearly 300 years ago. The proverb rings especially true in today's age of hyper-consumption.

Those few thousand rupees you're falling short by every month are a leak you're probably not trying hard enough to fix. The big payments - rent, EMIs, school fees, fuel costs and so on - are well accounted for. It's the smaller expenses that are easy to overlook. Multiple food deliveries to satisfy untimely cravings, a few extras in your grocery basket that set you back a couple of thousand rupees each time, that imported fruit or coffee from a popular cafe chain - it all adds up.

Thanks to the shift towards digital payments...