#99.) I set up a budget for my expenses on www.mint.com. This site organizes your finances and shows you where you can save and better budget your money. For those of you who know me know that I like to be very organized and might even know that I have kept track of every cent I have spent since Feb 2004. This site automatically tracks my expenses through all of my accounts and outlines everything with graphs and charts.

To set my budget, I used the average of several different categories from the first 6 months of this year and all of last year. For an example, this year I average $113.40 on food/groceries and $169.33 in 2008 on food/groceries. I set my budget at $120 and will get an email alert when I go over that budget for that category.

I only set budgets for categories that I can control. My utilities, rent, and car expenses stay the same for the most part and I cannot keep track of how much hot water I need to be using.