How to keep your budget in check

I've been using a great online tool to keep track of my expenses wedding and non-wedding related. Back before we were engaged, I was really focused on beefing up my understanding of personal finances. I borrowed books from the library written by Suze Orman, Jean Chatzsky, and I read David Bach's Smart Women Finish Rich book cover-to-cover. I was almost hyper-vigilant about my finances after that. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't spending more than I had and saving all that I could.

Then one day, I was reading an issue of Money Magazine that had featured a new resource for tracking expenses and then analyzing your habits. It's called Mint. It's a free tool and still technically in it's beta phase, but so far, it has proven to be an amazing thing, to me at least. You can track all your accounts, even investment accounts and it will summarize your spending habits and suggest better alternatives for credit cards if applicable.

Later on, after we were engaged, I found this article about using Mint to track wedding expenses. Within Mint, you can tag your expenses (similar to blog tagging) and then sort to see where you are at with spending. It's great! Try it out!