Money Diet

G. and I have decided we need to go on a money diet for the month of March.

We currently have very little debt - we owe on our house, and we have one credit card with a balance, and then regular bills, like electric, water, phone, etc.  We own all three of our cars, and don't spend tons of money on much else.  Plus, we make pretty decent money.  But we run through every cent we make every month.  And I feel like, since the beginning of the holidays in November, we've run through money like it's water.

So.

We are going to try something new.

For the last 10 years I've been in charge of paying all the bills.  Not for any particular reason, but just because.  G. and I are trying to redistribute chores a little bit, as well as work on communication, so we thought we'd start to work on bills, budgets and all that together.

Starting March 1, we are going to track all $$ and cents that come in and go out, while watching what we spend things on, so we can get a baseline.  At the end of the month we will be able to see what we've been doing, and then hopefully we can start to plan what we want to be doing in the future.

At several points during the month I'll share the spreadsheet with you, so you can see how we are breaking it all down.  My hope is that we will then switch to using something like Mint, that will automatically update us on our phones (we both live on our iPhones) once we have it all set up and configured.  I've been playing with Mint for a couple of months, but I've never gotten it totally set up.

So what do you think?  How do you plan your budget?  What tools do you use?