To Budget, or Not to Budget?

I am a reformed dumbass.

For my first three years of university, I threw all notions of a "budget" to the wind. I had a good job, I could pay my cell phone bill, buy groceries and prevent unwanted pregnancy -- completely unaided by loans, parental units or my boyfriend. I was living large on my own personal (collegiate) party barge.
And now I'm screwed.

To say that I lack funding would put me up for The Understatement of the Year award. Here's the current breakdown:

Checking: $21.01
Savings: $50.00
Purse: $11.56

Things are looking dire, friends! But I have seen the error of my ways and am working towards a new, financially healthy way of life. Luckily, I'm with my family for the next week or so (more on that later) which means I have a little time to eat/launder/smoke and drink for free. (This is especially helpful as I don't get paid for another two weeks.) I also have a little time to sort through my expenses and make a budget.

I didn't know a whole hell of a lot about creating a budget, but a buddy of mine turned me onto this site called mint.com. A nifty little planning tool, it offers these basic guidelines:

There are a few rules of thumb that you should keep in mind. Your housing expenses shouldn’t exceed about 33% of your income. And your total debt payment (which ideally should be zero!) probably shouldn’t exceed 30%. If you have more debt than that, it’s time to start cutting spending and looking for ways to cut fees on credit card accounts, savings accounts and other ways to save.

After signing up for this free and ostensibly very secure website, you can play around with your monthly budget: assigning different amounts to different categories of things. Because you sync your accounts/loans/credit cards to your mint.com account, it will automatically deduct from the correct budget amount. (If you find it to be incorrect, it's super easy to move it around to the right category.)

Here's my budget lay-out for June:

Try not to judge all that red. (I did just return from an unpaid internship in a very expensive foreign capitol.) But now you get the gist of what it looks like. At the top right corner, you can see the projected monthly savings on the current plan.

My pie in the sky goal for this year is to graduate with $3,500 to my name. It is my hope that $1,500 will come from cutting down on my monthly expenses. The rest of the money will come from various holidays and (hopefully) graduation checks. In a couple of weeks, I'll be generating an income again, so the numbers will hopefully be less dismal.

I'll keep you posted.