The key to keeping track is awareness. And the perfect tool for acquiring awareness is Mint.com put offered by Intuit, the same folks who brought us Quicken and Turbotax. But unlike Quicken and Turbotax, Mint is available for free and completely online. It’s available for your desktop, your phone, and your tablet so you can take your information anyplace that you might need it.
Mint tracks transactions through the bank and other financial institutions. As a user, you can enter information that will link your Mint account with your bank or investment accounts and maintain a real-time activity log from your accounts. Although it takes more effort, you can also track your cash transactions. However, with Mint it may be more efficient simply to use your debit card whenever possible to maintain a clean, effortless record of your spending.
Not only does Mint help you track where you’ve been and where you are financially, but it also helps you plan your future. The first tool that helps with planning is most obviously the Budget tool. Software budgets can sometimes cause all but the professional accountant to scratch his head in dismay. Mint offers an easy budgeting system that can initiate the financial novice as well as serve the needs of the veteran budgeter. With just a little time, anyone can set up a sensible budget. With minimal maintenance, Mint tells you how much you spend on average in a month for each category so in a year you have a sense of the amount you spend within that category. Once you have that information, you can intelligently decide whether to increase or decrease your budget for the year to come.
Coordinating the money you spend with your budget is pain-free. Typically, it takes 5 minutes a day to make sure that all new transactions pulled in from your accounts are categorized correctly so that spending categories are accurately reflected. Then simple bar graphs demonstrate whether you are on budget or not.
The second planning tool is the Goals tool. This tool considers vacations, cars, home improvement, retirement and others or you can add any financial goal that you can customize. It assists you in establishing a realistic goal over a realistic time period and then allows you to link it to an account. It will tell you at anytime if you are ahead, behind, or hopefully on target in meeting your goal. This is a rational alternative to putting things on high interest credit cards before you have the cash and then playing catch up later.
If you don’t budget, Mint is an incredibly user friendly method of starting. If you do budget, Mint is a great way to freshen up your finances.
