I tried to use Mint to track things, and it certainly can show you some glaring flaws in your spending. Things like noticing your stay at home wife likes to stop out for lunch a few times a week for some unknown reason. The problem I ran into was that unless my wife handed me the receipts, I couldn't see what she was spending. We do most of our shopping at Meijer (think Super Walmart except bigger, cheaper, and more normal people shop there...sorry Walmart, I feel dirty every time I walk through your door and see you customers). If I see my wife spent $500 there in a month, I can't tell if she bought beans and rice, liquor, or twenty pairs of yoga pants.
Until recently, I ran our finances with Excel. I had a list of all of our expenses for each month. I had irregular bills (annual/biannual) setup to save money every month. Paying the auto insurance bill was never a big deal any more. I had sink funds for auto/home repairs. I had been putting money into a "new car" fund. I was maxing out my company match on my 401k. My spreadsheet had my expenses and my wife's expenses separated. Every month, I deposited her money into her account. I told her that I didn't care how she spent it, as long as the things that were in our budget got paid. I tried to keep her account balance at a fixed level ($1000). If she was below $1000 at the start of the next month, we would talk about it and depending on the situation, we would adjust things or transfer extra money to cover extra expenses. The system kind of worked, except really, neither of us knew what percent either of us spent on anything. We each only had $50 for spending money. Mine got mostly spent on lunch once a week and the occasional slurpee. Hers was spent on those lunches, but either she overspent it, or she used it to cover overages on other areas. I thought my finances were under control, and really the fixed expenses were managed very well. Our discretionary expenses were basically organized chaos. We knew what we wanted to spend money on, but rarely did we ever spend it on them.
After having some hard discussions, I got my DW onboard with using YNAB. Unlike Mint, she now enters transactions on her phone. She does the splits so that we can clearly see that $X from meijer was for food, $X for her personal spending, $X for household, etc. It's also good to be able to pull up the app, see you have $20 in grocery budget left this month, and realize you can't buy the $30 in ribs you really want to buy because it's such a good sale. Money has to come from somewhere, and YNAB stops you from spending money you don't have if you follow it. I've told my wife that except for one or two categories (reimbursable expenses being one of them), we have to be >=$0 in each category at the end of each month. We can move stuff from groceries to fuel, or household to entertainment, but if those are all tapped out, we'll have to make harder decisions like taking from vacation savings or gifting/christmas.
YNAB helps you realize that you don't have the money to buy what you want before you buy something. Before, I would be suckered in by sales and deals. Sure, I might buy stuff for cheaper than normal, but was it stuff I needed? Hardly. Today is the 30th, and we have $0 left in groceries. If I go to the store today, I can't buy any groceries. Period. I'm not going to let my family starve, but we don't need any food. We've got plenty at home. It might not be fresh, and it might not be the preferred items, but we bought it, and quite frankly, we better eat it.
If you or your wife are like me, I got sucked into the idea that I could always get money from somewhere. I've always lived below my means to some extent, and I've always had enough savings to weather any small dips or bumps. Making our spending match the values that we profess we want, really was a hard task, but it's very rewarding. Finally, we can see our savings going up. We know what we spend our money on, why we spend it on those things, and we save for expenses instead of worrying about where money is going to come from. The key to getting my DW to sign on to YNAB was by pitching the idea that this wasn't handcuffs to limit how we spend money. It was a tool to make sure that we spent money how we wanted to spend money. We can always change our mind later. If you have any goals for your life, you can't afford not to budget and somewhat scrutinize your spending.