Making a budget

I am terrible with budgeting. I need some kind of spreadsheet (ahem... Crystal!) to help me budget better. Do you guys use a budgeting tool? What helps you stay on track?

not sure if this is what your talking about, but i keep a cash book that i got from cvs and i make a list for each month of what we get paid on the first of the month then all of our bills after that, then again on the 15th. it just helps me keep track of all the bills we have and make sure i pay them. and i also will know how much we will have left over for food and extra stuff.

Im kind of a budget freak. So I have four that I try to go off of. We have USAA, so I can loosely track my spending through their site. The rest I do in my head. We are lucky that it doesn't have to be exact, so I just did rough percentages to figure out my budget amounts, then adjusted as needed.

One is shopping, one is bills, one is fun money and the third is just misc. expenses.

Then i microbudget. Like when I'm doing grocery shopping, I have my list with the OOP price so that I have a somewhat rough estimate of what the total will be. Our bills vary month to month, so as long as they stay within a limit, we have fun money. Miscellaneous expenses is something I try not to touch unless necessary. Then at the end of the pay period, everything left over goes into savings. We have a rule that savings withdrawals have to be approved by both of us. Having that accountability is nice.

I made a budget excel spreadsheet, which I think I gave to Crystal.

I use it religiously. I can email it to ya if you want?

Send it my way Jeannette!

Sent it to your yahoo!

Thanks Jeannette! I even hooked up my printer today that I bought like 2 months ago so I can print them out!

Jeannettes budget is awesome!
I use something much more simple latley just for lack of time.
Plus mostly I just do it in my head...
I have combined and gotten rid of most my bills for the moment.
I do a LOT of online banking!