I've heard of that system too @WheresMySquishy but I feel like I'd forget where I put all the envelopes lol 

I'm no expert but some of my tips are: 

• Have a separate account for spending, savings and bills. Split your money up into the accounts when you get paid - or set up direct debits so you don't have to keep track of it. 
• Be very realistic about your spending and jot down all your expenses. Think of everything from upcoming birthdays, your daily coffee and haircuts. Budgeting for self-care is a good habit to get into 🙂 
• I plan for bills by estimating the yearly cost of my electricity, phone, gas, water, internet, car expenses, insurances, subscriptions. Divide the total amount by 12 and you'll see how much you need to debit into your bills account each month. 

I love your tips Bre, especially the one about writing down expenses. I also used to write down aome expenses in a table to help me remember them.

Also, sorry about the typos in my post. For some reason, I can't edit it.

Haha @Bre-RO  I totally hear you re the envelopes 😅 When we started giving my eldest pocket money, we gave her 3 jars: one for spend, one for saving, and one for donating to charity. Pretty sure it may be an idea my partner got from the Barefoot Investor - I really like how it introduces kids to the idea really early that your money can have different 'jobs'. 

I found using a budgeting app to be quite helpful @WheresMySquishy - I think they're especially helpful if you want to have a concrete idea of where your money is going. There's a few you can download, we used YNAB (You Need A Budget) but there's also some good free options. I used it to track everything I was spending for a few months, which helped us to put together a budget and make sure we were planning for those recurrent expenses like car service/ rego/ insurance/ dentist bills/ electricity bills that can often come as a shock. 

My other massive piece of advice that I wish that I'd followed more when I was younger is to make sure you keep track of your super! I ended up with about 5 different accounts because I'd worked in several different indusitries when I was younger/ when I was studying, and never bothered to roll them all together. It meant that I was losing money by paying several sets of fees etc- it's really easy these days to roll your super all into the one fund and to track down any money that you may have forgotten about: 

MoneySmart Consolidating your super

It was one of those bits of life admin that I had put off for ages- but it was so simple to do! As my Dad likes to remind me, super really is such a good way to save for old age in a relatively pain-free way!

I also find that simple things like cooking big batches of food and then portioning off leftovers for work lunches/ freezing for when I can't be bothered to cook is a big help to my budget. I'll often end up spending way more money than I planned on things like lunch at work/ Uber eats etc, and cutting down on that is a great way of saving some cash. I only keep a limited amount of cash in my "spending" account, I find that moving money into another account really helps me to be more disciplined with saving.