[FuckOffNeemo]

Use YNAB.

The blogs are fantastic. It's an electronic equivalent of making envelopes and putting cash into them

It's important that you work out roughly how much you're expecting for the month and you budget every dollar that you're expecting. 'Every dollar has a job'.

I budget all my yearly expenses. Place money aside every month for those, think license renewals, car registration, car insurance, rainy day funds. These are almost always direct debits. Car serving. Home maintenance and the like. Now it's important to state here that it's ok to not budget the exact value you're expecting for car serving, house maintenance and the like. But it's important to have cash put aside every month to contribute to those expenses if they're a lot greater than expected if you have a water leak or a break down in your as an example.

I then budget my monthly expenses which are groceries, new clothes, Netflix & Spotify subscriptions. Eating out\going out for drinks. Debt payments too.

I put 10-20% of my money away as savings. Anything left over goes into a seperate savings account for emergencies/rainy days.

[elamje]

I am going to give YNAB a try. I have been using Mint by Intuit for months, but it has always been a little to cluttered to keep me from getting use to it.

[Rainymood]

How do you tackle shared expenses? I live in a student housing with a roommate and sometimes we buy stuff for the house ... how would I manage this?

[FuckOffNeemo]

You can split expenses with YNAB. So you can either use one ore more categories called 'House expenses' & 'Money Owed' and split the expenses between those as you require (50/50, 70/30 or otherwise).

Personally though I've not seen it recommended by others, I categories the full expense to the category. And then when I get income from my housemate or who ever, I categories that income against the same expense category which leaves me the net and true out of pocket expense that I incurred.

[ashwin_bhat]

Split it in half if it can be quantised. If not then read game theory on watch some lectures on it. Game theory has a topic where the splitting in such cases is discussed.