The key point for personal finance is simple:
Spend less than you earn
Simple, but not easy
This sounds very obvious, but most people in trouble don't actually do this!
This can clearly be done by either augmenting income (hard to do but highest impact), or reduce spending (see below)
There are some basic principles of personal finance that are valid for everyone:
* you can't manage what you don't track
write down every single little expense that you incur for a few months (down to a cents level, including small expenses like coffee, parking, etc, up to big expenses like food etc). Categorize them into different buckets that are descriptive enough to identify small recurring expenses that add up over time (these will be your easy wins)
* Every dollar has a purpose
As you already know major expense categories, budget for them! Take the full amount you get paid, deduct your fixed and budgeted expenses, then you know what you have available for daily life). Set aside these amounts each time you get paid so that you are certain to cover your fixed expenses
* build an emergency fund
every month sock away some money towards a savings account that is easily accessible. You need this money for unforeseen expenses like broken car, appliances, medical expenses (especially since you have a pet) etc. It doesn't matter how much you save each month, but you have to do it! A good starting goal would be a 1 month salary, and go from there
* manage your expenses
After a few months of tracking, review your monthly spending. Find patterns and the easy wins (like a coffee habit that costs you a lot of money where you can easily reduce or switch to cheaper). This includes things that can be had for cheaper with a simple phone call (like your phone bill, or car insurance, or reducing spending on items that you do not care about etc). now the key part:
do not spend this money! instead add it to your emergency fund savings! This will give you traction without actually changing much in your life. The mental impact of this cannot be overestimated, having an emergency fund gives you a lot of mental peac e
* reduce debt
After some time of tracking, deducing patterns, saving that money into emergency fund, and optimizing your budget and expenses, you get to tackle the big one that will give you awesome freedom of mind and make everything click together: pay back your debts!
There are multiple ways to do this, but essentially you list all your debts, and decide which one to pay back first using money freed up in earlier steps (reduce your emergency fund contributions and push some of it towards debt repayment). I personally would advise to list them in order of amount (least amount first) and interest rate. By paying back the smallest amount with the biggest interest rate first you gain a lot of track early.
Now the key thing: Once you have paid back a debt in full,
do not spend the money you used to pay every month! Use it to pay back the next debt in the list! Now you get a lot of traction, as you can pay back the initial amount, plus whatever you freed up by removing the previous debt! Rinse and repeat!
* continue to track and manage your expenses and find ways to reduce/optimize them
This is a long term project, continue to invest into emergency savings, removing debt, and analyzing and optimizing your spending. At one point you will find something astounding: you start to have control over your finances! You have money to spend on the fun things in life and are fully aware of what impact it will have, and most importantly, you know you have full control over your finances and can make educated decisions!
That's all there is to it... track, manage, save, control!
Once you get ahead of the game, you can start looking at investing etc, but for now, do the above steps as best as you can and you will be far ahead of where you are today!
Most people would recommend Dave Ramsey's books for this. Ramit Seti's I will teach you to be rich is good also