Many of you were probably ambushed by the holidays and spent way more than planned. That's why January is the ideal time for our nationwide Take Total Financial Control campaign.

Say it with me, people: TTFC.

Forget New Year's resolutions (though if you want some good ones, click here). This is motivated by post-holiday regret. Pure and simple. A year ago, my husband and I participated in only one Secret Santa (for his family) and got a couple of gifts for my parents. And we still spent $403 -- exactly $203 more than we'd budgeted.

And that kind of budget blowout is our financial Waterloo in a nutshell. It's the root of every financial mistake, big and small. It works like this:

• You decide how much to spend based on the reality of your bank balance.

• BOOF! There's a tiny aneurysm in the financial lobe of your brain, so you ignore reality and spend whatever the hell you want.

• The next thing you know, you're one of the grim statistics about how Americans are totally in debt and have only saved 87 cents for retirement.

OK, where do we begin?

TTFC starts by following some classic financial advice -- and actually doing it this time. Good intentions are useless. Resolutions are just the first step. You have to take action.

• CUT. UP. YOUR. CREDIT. CARDS. YOU. FOOL. The First Law of Money Dynamics states that if you have plastic, you will use plastic. At the very least, stop carrying anything but a debit card and leave the credit cards at home, where you can't find them. Pay for it now or learn to say no to yourself. Meditate on the fact that by 2030, retirees will be short about $45 billion a year, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute -- because they're spending too much now.

• Get real. After working with the Women in Red, I see people making the same mistake over and over: They believe their money problems will be solved by someone or something else, somewhere down the line. So let's get one thing straight: You're not going to win the lottery or marry the Sultan of Brunei. Get over it.

• Start a spending plan. Budgets can be tricky, so for 2007 implement the simpler 60% solution. The Women in Red have been struggling with it because the task of keeping your committed expenses to 60% of your gross income is challenging. But this plan will get and keep you saving.

• Set up separate accounts for saving. The way Carole got herself to follow through on her savings plan was to set up two extra savings accounts: one for the short term, one for the long term. It didn't cost her a dime to set them up. The only way you're going to save those chunks of money is if you have a separate, special place to put them -- that is not linked to your debit card.

• Make saving automatic. Beth resisted the idea of using automatic transfers to help her save. "I want to feel like I can do this myself." What? Only savers save. If you're not a saver, raise your hand -- now use it to pick up the phone and arrange for automatic transfer forms to be express-mailed to your home or office, so that 10% is transferred to your new short-term savings account and 10% to long term every single paycheck. If you can't manage 10%, start with 5% and build up to it. Then get a copy of David Bach's "The Automatic Millionaire." It's a great book.

The secret TTFC weapon

OK, so that's the classic advice. Now for the cutting-edge stuff. Ready?

Your favorite group of financial crusaders has been trying software. Microsoft Money software. Why?

• We get it for free.

• Microsoft wants someone to write about their software. (Microsoft is the publisher of MSN Money.)

But I'm a journalist, and so I just want you to know that Brice also has used Excel to monitor her spending, and I use both Money and Quicken. I leave it to you to decide what sort of financial software works best for you, but you can't TTFC without it.

(I will now get angry mail from people who manage their money on paper just fine, thank you. And if you really can juggle all those statements and documents and receipts, God bless. Keep going.)

The software advantage

In case you've never encountered financial software, download a free trial of Money 2007 Deluxe here. Or you can search on your machine to see if a financial-management program is already installed.

Briefly, here's an overview of what financial software does. It can:

• Download all of your bank, credit card and investment transactions straight from your financial institution (so you don't have to enter anything manually, ever).

• Help you create spending categories and automatically assign many of your transactions to the correct one, so you can better monitor where the heck your money is going.

• Help you pay bills.

• Create saving, budget, debt-reduction and retirement plans.

• Generate pie charts, graphs, bar charts and other whirligigs that help you visually track your financial progress.

The REAL software advantage

But the reason I like money software is because it lays out the Bigger Financial Picture for you. And thus it forces certain issues to the surface, where you must face them. Or die trying.

When Carole was using the software to track her holiday spending a year ago, she was horrified to find that by mid-December she had spent $1,200. "And more is still coming in. I thought I spent about $750 during the holidays."

If you're trying to stick to a spending plan, software keeps you focused on what the real numbers are, so you are better able to control where your money goes.

It also helps you track your goals. About a year ago, when I used Microsoft Money's Debt Reduction Planner, I was rewarded with a huge graph that illustrated how long it would take me to pay down my $6,300 in debt at $500 a month -- about 14 months.

Now, I could have done that math myself. But seeing the graph map out that looooong year-plus of debt payment was irritating. So I had to adjust my timetable or pay $600 a month.

Facing the big questions

With the numbers, graphs and charts telling you the real story about your money, you are forced to make decisions. Brice, for example, knew that paying $2,370 in rent was unmanageable, but seeing both income and outflow in one place helped her to decide to take on a roommate.

And Carole decided to reduce her biggest uncharted expenditure: eating out, a real hazard for a single working woman.

"And I find I have a new consciousness about spending in general," she says.

The software disadvantage

After being wowed initially by seeing all her transactions in one place, Jill, in her mid-30s, was frustrated by Money. "I find software abstract," she said. "It gives you the numbers, but what does that mean? It's really just a tool -- and you need to learn how to use it. Just because you have a hammer and a drill doesn't mean you know how to build a house."

Using financial software of any stripe takes some work, I agree. There's no magical solution. It takes time to set it up and to understand the different functions. It helps to have a friend or computer-geek pal to help you figure things out (or you can join the Women in Red and cry on our strong shoulders).

But although using a financial program has its challenges, so did learning the ins and outs of e-mail, Google or any other high-tech convenience we now can't imagine life without.

Besides, it's all for the greater, greatest good: TTFC.