MINT

I wanted to pass along a little tidbit of info that has significantly simplified my financial life these past few months. I've already shared this with most of my friends here....but it's definitely worth hearing again! I've always tried to stick to a monthly budget and to plan ahead and monitor our expenses, but it's really easy to get lazy and stop keeping track, or not really realize where you're spending money, or how much you're spending on particular things. Despite valiant efforts, I feel like I've never really come up with the perfect format for tracking our finances...until now. Ben and I recently started using this website called Mint.com and it is awesome. It allows you to upload all of your financial accounts, credit cards, savings, checking, loans, assets; basically anything that relates to your finances. It then allows you to track every transaction you put on any card or through any account in one centralized location. It breaks down your spending into various trends, has great visual graphs and charts that help you better understand where you money is going, it allows you to set budgets in specific spending categories and then it sends you updates as you get closer to meeting/exceeding your budget. You can easily compare your spending trends month to month, see how much you spend at a specific vendor and they often have individualized recommendations on how you can save.

The biggest issue for us was whether or not our financial information was safe on this website. I have read review after review that goes into detail on the safety of the website. They say the biggest/only real concern would be someone getting access to your password which is a concern on any website, and with that, they couldn't get access to account numbers, they could only see what you see which is basically your account balances and your spending.

Check it out if you haven't already. I was pretty skeptical at first, but I have found we have spent way less in the last few month, simply because we are so accountable. Every single transaction shows up on the sight, which makes you think twice about buying that pair of shoes you really don't need! Not only that, but I've been shocked by what we're really spending our money on! (Lets just say we don't go hungry!)

I failed to mention one of the nicest things about the website...it's free!
Check out some of these reviews to get a better explanation of Mint's features.

Review 1
Review 2
Review 3