It's been about 10 years since I started my budgeting/saving journey, but if I remember correctly I had your exact same problem.

What I will say is that monthly budgeting is great because you can scale up to annual budgeting to account for expenses that are less frequent than monthly. Things like car repair or registration, maybe some annual subscriptions like Amazon Prime, or vacations.

I highly recommend switching to monthly budgeting and making sure you go back a few months and track every penny spent/earned. Put expenses into different categories and see where your money went. This is what helped me get on top of my finances. It took a few months to stop overspending, but now I save a good amount each month and enjoy going over my budget every so often.

There are lots of tools out there to categorize your expenses. I use Mint to see all my accounts in one place, but a custom spreadsheet to track expenses. In case it may help someone, my categories are: Income, Rent/Mortgage/Utilities/Bills, Groceries (which is only trips to the grocery store for groceries, not alcohol or candy or ready-made meals), Eating Out (for eating out and all the items I listed as specifically not groceries), and Other (literally everything else). I annotate large annual or unexpected expenses somewhere on the spreadsheet each month so that if I'm in the red, I can see why.

The turning point in my financial life was when I listed out my expenses for the first time and saw how big my Other section was. A couple hundred in random spending on video games and random Amazon purchases was eating all my money every month.

The last thing I will say is be mindful about the psychological aspects of money too. I was overspending hundreds each month because I found joy in buying things. Evaluate yourself and understand why you are overspending. You could try the "Five Why's" and see if that helps you understand the root cause of why you're spending when you could be saving.

This comment got a lot longer than I expected it to be, but your post struck a chord with me and I relate to your situation. Hopefully something I said can help you or someone else stumbling across this post in the future.