Managing your money can be a complicated task that can take a significant amount of time to complete correctly. The frustration of having to do everything correctly and consistently results in many people putting off financial tasks until the last minute and then rushing to do them as quickly as possible, increasing the chances that they will make mistakes. To make financial management easier, several companies have created online tools that you can use to track your expenses and spending with a minimal amount of effort. Here are some great tools to try.
Mint
One of my favorite financial management tools is a program called Mint. Mint allows users to enter their online login information for their financial accounts, like bank accounts, credit card accounts, and investment accounts, and it will download all of your transactions and balances each time you log into the program, giving you an up-to-date snapshot of your finances at any time. You can also enter information about your regular bills and their due dates and receive alerts when these bills come due.
Mint is also a budgeting tool, allowing you to create a budget based on your past spending trends. The budget can be adjusted at any time, allowing you to completely customize your budget to best suit your needs. The program also categorizes most of your transactions automatically so you can see your spending habits and see how well you are sticking to the budget you have created. If you put in the effort of managing where all of your money went each month, you are much more likely to stick to your budget and reach your financial goals in the future.
Finovera
Andy Prescott of ArtOfBeingCheap.com wrote a great article about using a program called Finovera to manage his bills and store his bill statements. The program allows users to enter online login information for all of the accounts that they would like the program to monitor, like utility accounts and credit card accounts, so the program can automatically retrieve statement information and compile it all in a single location. This makes it easy to keep track of all of your bills, when they are due, and how much they are.
There are a number of features available on Finovera that make managing your bills simple. The list of bills can be sorted in multiple ways so you can see them the way that you would like to pay them. You can also look at your activity over time and see how your bills have increased or decreased or set up alerts to let you know when a new statement has been received or a payment is due. There is also a “to-do” feature that you can use to keep track of financial tasks that need to be completed.
Both of these programs are designed to make managing your finances much easier. If you have used one of these programs, tell us about your experience. We would love to hear your opinion.