Can't say enough about Electrum as well, maybe you don't understand why we're all saying it's a good wallet to have but I started out on it and still use it today. It is as simple to use as most, yet can have very powerful features that you might want to upgrade too once you understand how to really use bitcoin.
1. Only you control private keys, which basically means only you can access yr coins. This is different from most web based clients or even other closed sourced clients where you can't know for sure what the code inside says.
2. Native segwit. It was the first wallet to let you use native segwit format, which basically means you can spend bitcoin with the latest upgrade. This makes yr tx size smaller than older formats and since fees are based on amount per size of data, this means cheaper fees for you.
Also as BreMaster points out:
there is also a step 0 to this that sometimes some beginners mess up.
0. don't accumulate dust in your wallet.
"dust" is the small transaction outputs, or in simple terms it is the small payments that you receive from different places like faucets, micro jobs,... not only it is a waste of time but also when it is time to spend all those coins the resulting transaction size will be huge and require a much higher fee.
Yep! I think wallets really need to be managed well and Electrum's coin control allows you to do just that. Regularly consolidate your bitcoin when the network is light on txs. I don't actually spend just to consolidate, instead, whenever I'm spending and I'm not too concerned about the party watching my other inputs, I just use a spend as a consolidate opportunity. ie. Use all inputs, and 2 outputs. 1 for the actual spend and 1 as a consolidated balance.
For me, if I'm spending, I either choose an input that's almost the right size, And if you've got inputs all over the place, use suitable sized ones to spend.