Two of the most common phrases I have heard clients say over the years are:
1) “I don’t have a budget.” or “I don’t know the first thing about making a budget”.
2) “I just dont have time to do all of that budgeting stuff.”
Well my friends, there is help. I have found another great tool to help manage your fast paced life and meet your financial goals as well. Mint.com is this nifty application that allows you to monitor ALL of your accounts in one place. Once you establish your profile with them, you can create budget categories and savings goals for nearly anything. It even tracks your uncateregorized expenses and suggests budget categories for them. Then based on the goals you set, Mint.com will send you text alerts to help track your progress. Any they have great colorful graphics in the way of pie charts and line graphs that let you see your progress.
The site is very secure and safe to use. You do give them your account information but as they explain in their privacy practices, they never connect your personal information to you account information and it is a “read-only” site. Mint.com uses bank level security to protect the information they do have.
So, give it a try. I just set up my Mint.com account this week. I am excited to see how I use it and will be reporting back here. I would love to have your feedback if you try it out.