Making a Budget & Sticking to it

As I posted a little previously Beau and I are making a budget as our family income is taking a hit due to maternity.  We finished the budget part last weekend.  Now we are on the sticking to budget part.

As I suspected, we already have a pretty lean budget to begin with.  More than 50% of our budget is fixed costs like house, car, insurance etc.  The only place we could cut our expenses is food and entertainment.  Food is one of our indulgences.  We love our regular restaurants and trying new ones.  Also, one of our bad habits, where a lot of our groceries goes to waste because we just forget to eat them on time.  This year we are going to cut back on this part of the budget by keeping the eating out to special occasions or outing with friends/family.  This also means we will do more meal planning and hopefully cut down on the food waste at home.

I don't want to spend too much time on tracking our spending.  I already keep books for my rentals, Beau's business, and my small business so I don't want another set of accounts to keep.  So I'm trying out Mint.com.  The first glitch with mint.com happened today when it didn't work with my MBNA Mastercard.  I submitted a ticket so hopefully they will have it resolved soon.