Financial Peace

We are in the 6th week of FPU with Dave Ramsey. It is going pretty well so far. I think it has really shown us how much money we spend waste. We don't go exactly by the rules, but for the most part we do. If that makes sense. Basically you should work with a zero balanced budget. Meaning you should budget spending all your money for the month (like Dave does) or like me and by pay period. I just found it a lot easier that way. I have this whole Excel spreadsheet I made for our budget. It is probably a little too nit picky, but I like it and it shows EVERY $ we spend, what we bought (I don't put down every item we buy, like the time when we made our fist trip to the grocery store after doing the budget and spent $279!!) I about had a stroke!

Another one of Dave's tips is the envelope system. You should pay cash for certain items like gas, food, clothing, etc. Each category would have a envelope with a beginning balance and you would simply deduct each time you used money from that envelope. I do basically the same thing, but with my debit card. I have a couple of categories. Clothing/Entertainment, Groceries, Gas, & Eating Out. I just keep up with everything in Excel instead of the envelope.
Sometimes I feel so overwhelmed with this whole budget thing. We are not in debt. We just don't save like we should and we waste money. So why I am stressing so bad? I am to the point where I feel bad when I buy something (even though it's budgeted) or I don't even want to buy anything-which is strange. I guess in the long run I just want to control OUR money and not OUR money control us! That is what I want to accomplish from this whole Financial Peace class.
Sometimes I just wish life were a little bit easier and I don't worry about the little things so much.