Help me Budget

[Etino]

We should be saving, we’re haemorrhaging money and I really need to get to grips with it. I think about every purchase I make yet, somehow every month we use it all up, and regularly dip into savings.
Can anyone recommend an app I can use to log what I spend? I’ve tried looking and just got confused and panicky, what do you do if you take out cash, do you log that as spent and then it gets spent twice surely, but if I don’t note what I’m spending it on surely that’s not budgeting is it
Please someone break it down really simply for me.

Look through your bank statements.

List all your essential spending like rent/mortgage and utilities.

Then list everything that wasn’t essential. Do you meal plan for groceries, and are your utilities on the best rate?

When budgeting lots of people track their spending, but this can be a bit ‘shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted’.

I personally use YNAB ( quite an old version, I don’t know too much about the latest version). Google it, it’s quite a game changer.

I used to feel like I had savings goals but then at the end of the month something would always crop up and we’d end up not managing to save, but I’d think ‘we’ll save twice as much next month to even it out’, but low and behold next month it’d be a similar story. YNAB basically gets you to save up a little each month for annual or quarterly expenses.