Do you budget?

If you do, you're like 58 percent of Americans who say they do track their monthly spending against a monthly budget. That's according to a new survey from Bankrate.com released Monday.

The survey found that more college educated people budget than those without a degree. The survey also found that you are more likely to budget if you make between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. Parents also budget more than those without kids.

Interestingly, 67 percent of Hispanics and 65 percent of blacks report budgeting compared to 57 percent of whites.

The margin of error for the survey is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Personally, I go back and forth about budgeting. For a while we didn't budget, preferring a method of automating savings and the payment of major fixed expenses and trying not to spend all of what was left.

But we were regularly coming close to spending all of our cash, and I almost had to dip into savings to pay the credit card bills after a couple of big ticket purchases. So we are back to tracking our spending. I started with a piece of paper that was stuck to the fridge. Then my husband threw together a simple spreadsheet.

We used to use Mint but stopped in recent months. That's a blog entry for a different day.

Your turn: Do you have a budget? What method do you use? Do you go the old pen and paper route or do you prefer a website such as mint.com, where you turn loose your financial info and the site tracks and categorizes your spending for you?