I've been there!!! I fell into a serious trap where no matter how much I was budgeting, I was still coming up short near the end of my pay period and having to charge everything, which was defeating the purpose of the money I was putting towards paying down the cards.

Do you have a breakout of what you earn, and what those bills are? I don't know if you feel comfortable sharing that publicly, but that would help me help you, since I went through the same thing, and having solid numbers to look at sometimes helps.

Or, if you can afford it, I actually signed up for the Budget program through LearnVest and its been a great help. Alternatively, they have a whole section in the knowledge center about budgeting. I think you maybe should take a look at the 50/30/20 budget method they use and see if that's something you can accomplish.

Okay, so I would say first step, definitely, is take your take-home pay for a month, and subtract out the following things:

Rent
Train

When you get the resulting total, you should automatically allocate something to savings before you even think about the other bills. I used 10% of my pay before taxes as a goal. For me, that's close to $300 a month. I take this out immediately via direct deposit so I don't see it and it goes into an emergency fund for the pet bills (have a puppy, feel your pain!), or other emergencies.

After you put money away in your savings, then take a look at your credit card and student loans. If your goal is to pay off your credit card debt (like mine was) then you want to focus on allocating more money towards that while paying the minimums due on your student loans. I was paying more than the minumums on my loans, which was sucking up money that I could have been paying towards those higher-interest rate cards.

So, from take-home pay minus rent and train, minus savings subtract out:

Minimum student loan payments
Credit card payment

Don't do what I did and make the payment towards the card so high that you are left with no money at the end of the month and have to use the card again to make ends meet. This might take some trial and error (it did for me).

After all of that, what you have left is discretionary. You can continue to either 1) budget out for each of the other categories you stated above, just use that money as a total of what you can spend, or, do a combination of both.

For example, for me, I can't budget down to the dollar on expenses every month. I do allocate money towards pet-expenses that I put into a separate checking account. If I don't use it, it becomes part of that cushion I have for vet expenses. I also know that I need $160 a month for gas. Past that, I'm not really fussy about what I spend when as long as I have money by the end of the pay period - so what my LV financial planner suggested was that I take the remaining money, and (since I'm paid bi-weekly) divide it by two. That would be my money for groceries, eating out, alcohol, gifts, etc for one week. When it's gone, it's gone. I don't get to use the second half of that money until the next week.

Also, what helps, is that if you eat out a bunch but also are finding yourself spending a bunch on groceries (oh man, totally me), you could see where you can cut back in those areas. Now, I only go to the store the day I'm going to cook and only pick up what I'm going to make. If I eat out, I try to only eat one portion size and bring leftovers home for the next day.

Hope that helps a bit!