<prompt> Human: I feel like I am in over my head a bit. I accepted a job a earlier this year with a substantial raise to help my family out. Currently I took a salaried position in Manhattan for 50,000 a year. Between rent, phone, internet, monthly train pass dog food and my wifes car insurance that leaves me with about 1400 a month. Thats not factoring in groceries as I feel its never a stable value. My wife always likes to buy as we shop and gets things like jars of pasta sauce that range from 3-8 alone so we could easily go from 200-400 a month. She is in school full time and works but mainly enough to pay for her car payment, phone and our health insurance as my job does not offer any. Ive never been good with savings but my dream is to eventually buy a house but I can never get ahead. We have about 4K in credit card debt as well. Nothing that we cant pay off. The monthly payment varies but we just took this one with moving expenses and new furniture for our bigger place we moved into when I took this job. At the end of the month I have next to nothing left after eating in lunches at work or going out sometimes to eat, weekend outings with friends or my wife. Any advice how to tackle this and start saving and or getting ahead. I am not really living paycheck to paycheck worrying about bills; though I would really like to start getting ahead of this and getting savings put away and all!Thank you!Update 1Thank you really for the outpour of replies, programs and articles everyone has linked me. This was a slap of reality I needed to put things into motion. I have since reached out to my wife and tonight we will be coming up with a a budget and making this a reality. I truly do appreciate the time all of you have taken to help with this. It means a lot. Thank you all.Update 2My wife and I sat down last night and we talked about a set plan going forward. I acknowledged a ton of my pitfalls and spending habits and worked on a way to get these aligned. I packed a lunch box today for work to cut down the costs of lunches. We are also going to work on meal prepping and writing strict grocery lists. After auditing our accounts we found last month alone we spent 700 on eating out. 399.00 of which were dinners out the remainder was lunches I was buying at my job. I think I really needed to put this down on paper in front of me to get a perspective of how bad of a problem it was. We both created excel finance budgets and a test run with YNAB. We even skipped out on coffee and made it from home this morning. Thank you everyone for the contribution, really needed help from an outside source.  <response>: My wife always likes to buy as we shop and gets things like jars of pasta sauce that range from 3-8 alone so we could easily go from 200-400 a month. Your wife needs to stop doing this.You guys need a reasonable amount budgeted for food, and you need to stick to that budget. 