Over the past decade, financial experts have created numerous financial innovations designed to make it easier for the average person to manage their finances themselves. These online tools cover virtually every aspect of personal finance, streamlining the processes and making them simple for someone to use from the comfort of their own home. These programs reduce the amount of time that you must spend each week on money management tasks by a significant amount. Here are some of the types of online programs that can be used for your money management needs.
Online Budgeting Programs
Online budgeting programs are some of the best tools to use for simplifying your money management. Budgeting can be very difficult for some people, especially if they were never taught the proper way to budget their money. These programs take the guesswork out of budgeting, taking the person’s income and dividing it up into categories like housing, utilities, transportation expenses, and food expenses. Allowing the program to calculate the budget will show you how much you should be spending in each category. You can also modify the budget so that you can budget for all of your needs using the income that you earn.
Online Banking Programs
There are also many banking programs available online that can help you with money management. These programs allow you to see your account balances and your transaction history for the bank accounts that you own. These programs may also give you advice on the best types of financial products for your spending and saving habits and alert you to any interest rate changes that could affect your financial stability. Viewing your bank information online reduces the risk that your banking information will be compromised because there is no paper trail of your banking activities.
Online Payment Programs
Many people take advantage of the automatic payment programs that are available online. These programs allow you to schedule all of your recurring bills to be paid each month out of your bank account without any further action from you. All you have to do is input the account information for your recurring bills and provide authorization for these bills to be automatically paid. The automatic payments can be changed at any time by altering the authorization information on the program’s website. Many of these programs are administered by the bank where you hold your bank accounts.
Hey Renee – good point regarding the software. A couple of online wealth development software packages out there include: jemstep.com and personal capital.
One issue I think with a lot of on-line banking software packages is that they aren’t completely integrative – that means that they do a good job with stocks but less so with real estate or illiquid assets like precious metals.