>>101

Start keeping track of everything. I keep a series of notebooks for all of my accounts as well as my expenses and income. Any time money moves through my hands it gets written down in at least two different spots, not including monthly and quarterly reports. That's a little intense, and an awful lot of work for most people, so I'd suggest that you look into quicken or something similar to start. Learn a bit of accounting, like how double entry bookkeeping works, and start applying that to your finances.

That said, it sounds to me like what you're really concerned with is saving some cash for a rainy day and the way to do that is pick a number (5% or 10% or 20%, whatever you can manage) and start taking that right off the top of your paycheck the same way that taxes are done. You'll want to open a money market savings account in a place where you won't look at it frequently. The idea is that you forget about the money once it's in your savings acct.

So, for example, your paycheck at 20k a year bi-weekly after taxes will be about $576.92, if you were to start saving 10% of that you'd take 57.69 off the top before any other spending happens and put it in a savings account where you'll forget about it. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind this happens every two weeks, that's 26 times a year. So, if you can do this for a whole year, you'll have about $1500 squirreled away and hopefully earning ~1% interest. And that's not a whole lot, but it's better than nothing. If you get into this habit now, and make it just a part of your way of life, you'll find yourself in 3-4 years with $10-20k in the bank asking /money/ what the fuck to do with your savings so you can make money off of it.

Hope that helps.