If you don’t have a budget planner to have a realistic budget you’re never going to know where all of your money is going.

Be honest with yourself about your spending. It’s highly unlikely that you’re only spending that $10 a month on fast food when you’re actually spending more like $40-$50. Sometimes you might be surprised on how much you’re actually spending once you start to track it. The only way to figure this out is to start saving your receipts and writing down your expenses and tracking them. This includes the money you spend for everything.

Don’t put anything off, start today and save the receipt. You’ll create a basket or a good tracking method for you to keep your receipts so you can enter them in nightly or once a week at the latest otherwise they are going to start to pile up to the point you’re unlikely to enter them in. It doesn’t matter what you use just that you’re going to keep them and then enter them in.

If you’re a person that purchases things online create a folder online or you can print or write it out and put it into the same basket.

You’re going to want to do this for the entire month saving and adding up all of your receipts. Where did you find out where all your money went? To further analyze you’re going to need to put everything into piles with your monthly bills in one and your variable spending in the other.

You can put all of this information into a spreadsheet using Excel. If you don’t have Excel don’t worry you can get one for free from Open Office at http://www.openoffice.org or by using Google Documents There are also commercial options available for purchase if you want to get something else. It doesn’t matter what you use as long as you’re using something.

The most important part about it is to make sure that you’re tracking everything. The best way to get out of your budget and fail is to not be honest. You don’t have to become a hermit but you need to realize the areas that you’re overspending and make sure that you correct theses. It doesn’t mean that you have to eliminate them just bring the spending down to a reasonable amount.

Finding out how much you’re spending and putting it to where it really needs to go will give you a much needed sense of freedom sometimes. It’s actually likely going to make you feel much better about yourself then to not. You’ll be getting your bills paid and still have some money in the budget to have some fun.