Saving money / budgeting

For 2012, we're going to have to start living on a tighter budget. My somewhat lame attempts at budgeting in the past have been more guidelines than anything; keeping track of actual spending is actually *really* hard for me. But once I have this baby, I want to either quit work or drastically cut back my hours. To make that happen, I'm going to have to figure out how to be thrifty in everything, not just grocery shopping (that's the only area I don't struggle with knowing how much to plan for and then stick to).

To that end, I've been researching a lot. Sometimes it seems like far more of a headache than it's worth to try to find the best deals, but saving $5 here and there actually does add up pretty quickly! If you haven't already seen them, here are some top "money-saving" sites:

• Ebates - this sounds too good to be true, but ebates gives you cash back when you shop stores through links on their site. I joined last week and so far have racked up $10.16 in refunds with more pending. If you shop online at many popular stores, this seems like a great thing to sign up for! If Amazon was one of their vendors, this would be completely perfect....
• Swagbucks - not as good a deal, but if you use them for searching and other activities, you can rack up points (swagbucks) and redeem them for gift cards and other "swag." I've been using it for a few weeks and have 402 points - need at least twice that many to get most of the $10 gift cards, so it takes some patience. And their search results are *definitely* not as good as Google's. Still, if you have a few extra minutes to spare, seems like it will turn out to be a good deal.
• Money Saving Mom - she blogs about great deals but all just frugal living in general. Or you can like her on Facebook if it's easier to follow her frequent posts in your Facebook feed.
• Bargain Babe - another blog about deals, coupons, etc. I like following her blog because she doesn't post as often as others, so it's a more manageable stream of information. :)

But I have to admit...I really don't see what the big deal about Mint.com is. Maybe it's just the credit card we use, but half the transactions don't show the store name, only the address. That makes categorizing them a total pain. However, they did save us a bundle by recommending we change insurance - we switched providers for auto and homeowners and are saving several hundred bucks. Wo0t!

Anyway, from all my reading, I think I'm gathering good principles...it's just a matter of being able to put them into practice.