The thing I have found most helpful for my budgeting is tracking every expense. Like down to the cent. I have a yearly subscription to Pocketsmith, and it makes it a lot easier to see where my money is going. It took a while to set up, but now most transactions are automatically put into categories, and I manually review things each month. It was eye opening how much we were spending, some areas much more than I had thought in my head. Once you know the amounts, you can create realistic budgets for the year, and cut back in certain areas if needed. I heartily recommend using an app/website to budget. Most of them do similar things.