I have used Personal Capital to pull in all the transactions and classify them into expenditure groups (entertainment, meals, utilities, etc.). Once you do it for a month or two, it pretty much knows what everything is (and knows a lot by default already). Then you can see where all your money is going and determine if you are spending too much in any one area like meals or something else that's discretionary and make changes. If you have your bank accounts hooked up along with your credit and retirement accounts you can also see your monthly cash flow as well as your net worth. You can also add your mortgage data to pull automatically like any other account. Also can log anything else that doesn't have an account which it can connect to and you can update manually to get the full picture.

For investments I'm restricted at work for compliance/legal reasons so I'm limited to ETFs and similar products (no individual securities). I've heard great things about Robinhood and would probably just use them or another no-commission broker (there are a bunch now). The easiest way to get good returns is just use index fund products. They have low fees usually and aren't that risky. You don't way outperform the market unless you really just get lucky, but it's very simple and easy to do. Full disclosure - I work in this area of financial services, but it really is a far cheaper option than just about anything else. Unless you have a stellar financial adviser (top 15%), they aren't usually going to be able to justify their fees over the long haul.

I pay my credit card multiple times a week so that I never pay interest and never get tempted to do anything foolish. Every day on the way to work I log on and pay whatever has posted that morning. My card has 2% cash back on everything, no limits (Citi DoubleCash), so it's very simple and straightforward.

I contribute enough to max out the legal 401k contributions allowed by law. If you can afford that, you should definitely do it. At the very least, get the employer match if you have one.

I have free accounts with Credit.com and Credit Karma. Log in periodically when they update to see where it has moved and why. They give recommendations - sometimes they are silly or not-realistic. But at least you can see what's going on and monitor for free.

Your credit card also probably has an identity protection tool - highly recommend this as it is part of good personal finance. Register all your known accounts, IDs, etc. so that you can get alerts if that data is being traded on the black market.

As far as additional savings, it's a roller coaster because every time I up the checking account over a series of months some large expenditure is needed (home repair/improvement, car, medical, something). But I try to mentally have a bottom in my head that I don't want to see the account go under and if it does, I try to cut back on extraneous things until it goes up by a fair amount. Over time, I raise that bottom. That allows for some growth in additional savings without having to be micromanaging a budget.

I always buy used, cheap cars. Neither my wife or I are car people. We don't care. Just an A to B type of thing. Highly recommend that. Pay X up front out of pocket every 5-10 years and then only around $1,200 a year in maintenance. Far cheaper in the long run.