Yay budgeting!

My husband and I are big Dave Ramsey fans.  If you haven't listened to Dave's radio show or read his books, he is a financial guru who focuses big on getting rid of and avoiding debt.  A big thing he advises is using what he calls "the envelope system," where you budget your monthly expenses and pay for them exclusively with cash, which you store in an envelope.  You have an envelope for each category, like groceries, entertainment, personal purchases, etc.

We tend to do okay with our budget, but when we've tried to use the envelope system it usually kind of falls apart.  I find it to be a little inconvenient to use cash and to have it all sorted out into the exact right amounts all the time, and having to frantically find the right category at the checkout, and I never know what to do with coins, and most of the time we forget to go get cash at the beginning of the month anyway.  But today I came across a variation of the envelope system that I think could work pretty well for us.  I found it on Just Sweet and Simple while I was looking for fun printables, and I'm excited to try it.

Rather than using the envelopes (she has some cute ones you can print and glue together for free, but I ended up designing some of my own) to keep your cash and then dish it out when you're at the store, you use your debit card like a normal person, and then store your receipts in the envelopes and log the purchase on the envelope, like a check register.  Not a particularly ground-breaking system, really, but it's a far cry from swiping the card every time I feel like making a purchase.  Plus, finding a new way to do something tends to make me a lot more excited to do it at all, so all of a sudden budgeting doesn't sound so bad.

A blurry picture of the envelopes I designed

How do you keep track of your budget?