I’m aware of rising food and energy prices. Who isn’t? But lately I’ve begun to notice that fueling up the car and the family is causing us to exceed our budget month after month.

I tried to track my spending about a month ago, but if you haven’t heard, that’s hard to keep up, and I fell off the wagon weeks ago.

So I went back to Mint.com, a free, secure site that aggregates and categorizes all of your credit card and account data for you. It also recently added a feature to allow you to aggregate your investment account data as well.

It took about an hour to properly categorize some misidentified purchases (since when is Green Mill a church?). And I’m still having trouble getting one of my financial institutions to regularly update when I log on.

But when finished, I had a pretty accurate, albeit startling assessment of our food and fuel costs in the form of a handy dandy pie chart.

I clicked on the “trends” tab and found that so far in July, we’ve spent $352 on food and eating out. Sounds like a respectable amount for a family of four, until I tell you that we’ve spent an equal amount of money using Cub Foods gift cards a la the stimulus rebate and hit the farmer’s market a couple of times!

As for gas, we’ve spent $162, although some of that will be reimbursed mileage for work.

Just a few months ago $500 would pay for food for our family with room to spare.  That included a pizza and a night out at a casual restaurant.

Gas used to cost $125 a month– including a trip from St. Paul to the Minnesota Zoo. Not any more.

So that leaves my husband and I with a budget we’ve yet to balance. We don’t want to save less, and we don’t want to make changes to our spending habits. But something has got to give, and we’re both mulling that over in the days to come.

One thing I’ve been considering lately is a chest freezer to facilitate smarter shopping and batch cooking. That would eliminate going out to eat or getting take-out about once per week.

Dining out is a crapshoot with small kids anyway. Last time we went out for a “relaxing meal,” I made three trips to a smelly bathroom, had to peel a kid off the floor, confiscated crayons after they became airborne and didn’t even enjoy the food. We paid $38 for that mistake — with a coupon.

The helpful folks over at the Minnesota Extension Service have compiled 17 fact sheets chock full of tips for getting through times when money is tight.

From deciding which bills to pay first to communicating under pressure, you’ll get some unbiased, reasonable advice from these pages.

But I especially like the section for helping kids get through tough times. How do you talk to a teen about working to help pay the bills or moving because of a foreclosure? I think kids often get left out of the discussion. On the flip side, people tend to use credit to extend an unsustainable lifestyle because they don’t want to disappoint their children or are clueless about discussing their financial reality with their kids.

Another Extension resource worthy of linking to in these times is adjusting to suddenly reduced income. 

The check came right on schedule. Visions of flat screen TVs, video games and a day at the spa came with it. But I dutifully headed to Cub Foods and turned $1200 into two $660 gift cards — the maximum amount the company allows. It’s a strategy I explained in this earlier post.

Like many Americans, the other $600 from our check will go towards paying off a credit card balance. June was an expensive month, with some eating out, some reunion expenses and the purchase of a new patio set. Hence, the tracking spending exercise I started mid-June.

I must admit that exercise has fallen by the wayside of late. I did do a quick and dirty assessment, though, and our credit card transactions showed we’re spending about $15 more in gas than we budgeted and that we ate our entire fun budget for the month.

For the past year or so, our financial life has been humming along without a budget. We’ve been automatically saving for retirement, emergencies, and big ticket expenses. We pay our fixed expenses and then treat ourselves now and then to dinner out, a movie, or a trip to a pool.

But I started noticing in recent weeks that the $1,000 or so reserve in our checking account I try to keep to avoid any chance of an overdraft was shrinking. By the time we paid our credit card bill and our money was whisked into savings, we’d have $500 or $600 in reserve.

This pay period, we’ll have just $195 left over after fixed expenses and savings. The culprits? Well, food and gas, of course. Our gas bill is up, even though we don’t drive much or very far. Our food bill is up about $100.

But it’s not just rising prices. I admit that we’ve been having a little too much pricey fun lately. Our day care bill also just increased by about $90 per month. Our salaries, on the other hand, have not.

In a situation like this there are only two things to do: Cut savings or cut expenses. We could try to earn more income, but that would require working more. That for our young family would be an option of last resort.

Naturally, cutting expenses will be the first avenue I explore. I could spend time with Mint.com or Quicken or another software program, tracking my spending the 21st century way.

But instead, I’ve opted for a folded up piece of paper in my purse that I’ll use to document how much I spend on gum, fizzy water, shoes, or roast beef sandwiches.

I’ll be honest though. I don’t want to cut expenses. We’ve just agreed to cancel cable now that Top Chef is over. But I’m comfortable with how much we spend and don’t think we are extravagant.

So in the next couple of months I’m also going to take a look at savings. Is it possible that we are saving too much? Or with an uncertain job market and the economy, am I totally nuts to even consider putting less away?

I joined the Speedy Rewards gas loyalty program because they have a deal on gallons of milk.

I was so oblivious to gas prices until recently (hey, a girl can only care about so much when it comes to saving money), that it failed to dawn on me that I bet a gas station rewards program had perks at the pump in addition to the dairy case.

It was only recently that I began using the coupons for Holiday Stations that print out after spending money for groceries at Cub Foods. Why would I walk all the way inside instead of pay at the pump to save a few pennies, I figured.

Then when I’m at Costco, which is less often these days, I fill up there. The warehouse clubs typically have gas that’s a few cents cheaper than nearby stations.

How do you save money on gas? Are you a fan of one particular rewards program over another? Share your strategies.