This is something that my darling wife and I are just getting a handle on. We went to a one-on-one budget counselor a couple weeks ago to get some advice about the best way to get things under control. The result was that we could, down to a couple dollars one way or the other, pretty much pinpoint how much of our income was headed out in the form of monthly bills and fixed expenses. The part that baffled us was where all the REST of it was going.
It turned out that our major losses were coming in the form of day to day expenditures and continuous trips to the store for this and that. We would do all of our grocery shopping for the week on Saturday... and then go for some milk on Monday, a loaf of bread on Tuesday, some meat for dinner on Wednesday, a few desserts on Friday, etc. Each one of those trips would add up to no less than $40 or $50 because, while we were at the store, we'd inevitably see something else we needed/wanted and throw it in the cart.
Wow. Basically, we found out that we were spending our weekly grocery budget at least twice every week. Our solution was to start shopping only with a list. We keep a list up on the refrigerator, write down things as we think of them, and then go shopping with that. We can still go to the store every day of the week if we want to, but we can ONLY buy the items that are on the list, and we no longer try to make a single, huge shopping run and pretend that it will get us everything that we will want for the next week or two.
My previous thought was that if we could only go shopping every couple weeks, like I used to do back in my bachelorhood, then we'd save a lot of money, but that just caused feelings of deprivation that lead to even more spending.
Joshua