Add it up

I find that guilt is the best budgeting tool. But mint.com is pretty neat, too.

I’m the kind of person that needs a little nudge to pay attention to my bank account, so I signed up for the Web site’s free application.I wanted to play around with it for a few weeks before I blogged about it, after some positive reviews from friends that have used mint’s iPhone app.

So far I’ve been pretty pleased. I like the weekly e-mails about spending, which remind me to check the site, and the tools for for staying on track. And it helps stir up those guilty feelings by serving up a little exclamation point every time you got charged an ATM fee and lets you see graphically what it means when 4 percent of your spending takes place at 7-11.

It makes following your spending trends easy and the site comes with some pretty good financial info too, though it’s a little scary to save your bank passwords online.

Of course, there are tons of budgeting programs on the market, from Quicken and Microsoft Office to the oldfashioned pen and a piece of paper.

When we’re paying with plastic and direct-depositing our checks every month, it can be hard to get a mental handle on what we’re spending. I think that’s why our budgeting is moving online too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Commoncents and tagged with budget, personal finance, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.