Go-To App: mint.com
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Keep track of and understand your spending habits using free software from mint.com.
If you are resolving to spend your hard-earned money more carefully in order to set aside funds for retirement, travel, investment, or a major purchase, you will want to take a look at mint.com’s powerful software.
For an unbiased overview of mint.com’s features, take a look at PC Mag.com’s editor’s choice review here. You can also learn more at the mint.com website. The web-based financial tracking software pulls transaction data from any account that you authorize (eg, bank accounts, credit cards, investment accounts), then categorizes them by expense type and provides you with a summary of expense category spending. You can easily customize the results by adding new subcategories, setting up rules for future categorization, and excluding certain items or accounts from analysis, such as reimbursable expenses.
Data is automatically transferred from your accounts real-time, which makes it possible to keep track of your daily spending and earning. When you first set up your mint.com account, the software pulls historical data from the past 60 to 90 days and uses that information to create a preliminary budget. If you want to revise the budget amounts, that’s easy to do, too, as is customization.
Do you prefer to pay with cash rather than exclusively using debit and credit cards? Just manually enter these transactions, assigning expense categories of your choice. If you download the mobile app, you can record your expenses on the fly, though be aware that the app does not provide the same breadth of options as the software so may not be where you choose to fine-tune your results.
Mint.com provides weekly spending summaries by email as well as alerts when you have exceeded your budget or shown a significant change in your spending patterns. On your home page, you can see the due dates and amounts of upcoming bills and review your actual expenses against budget by each spending category. There is also an option to have your current credit score displayed. While you will see advertisements for relevant financial products, happily they do not pop up or otherwise interfere with the usefulness of the site.
How safe will your information be? Mint.com claims its security to be on-par with what most banks offer and encourages users to create a unique PIN to sign. But be sure to use a strong password. (More about creating strong passwords here.) To learn more about security, see this article and mint.com’s security information. You may be reassured to know that mint.com is owned by Intuit, the makers of Quicken and TurboTax.