Mint

If you haven’t heard of Mint.com, you’re definitely missing out. As one of the premier online financial management programs there is, it’s simple to use and comprehensive for anyone to use well. It is absolutely one of “our favorite tools”. But what does it do exactly?

Answering that question will get to the heart of why you arrived at this article in the first place: to organize your life and finally - finally! - feel like you’ve got your financial house in order. If you want to get rid of that sinking feeling, worrying about money, then it’s time for you to get organized. And we just happen to be well-acquainted with a popular tool that can help you reach that goal. Without further ado, here are five ways you should use Mint to organize your life.

1. Setting budgets. Mint.com allows you to set budgets on just about anything. This isn’t a particularly groundbreaking piece of software, of course. People have been setting budgets since the invention of pen and paper. But there’s more to the story. Since Mint.com can align with your financial accounts and track all of your transactions (think credit card bills and debit statements), you can automatically track your purchases and let Mint.com do the budgeting for you. You can even set Mint.com to e-mail you once you’ve gone past a monthly budget. What’s more, you can have a budget roll over to the next month as a reward for under spending. If this isn’t enough for you to sign up to Mint.com, we don’t know what is.

2. Tracking spending. Nothing quite inspires the inner bargain hunter like seeing how your actual spending behaviors are playing out in the real world. Seeing your spending tracked can help you identify the changes you need to make and where you can afford to spend less. Mint.com can handle this virtually automatically and seamlessly if you use it to track all your financial accounts.

3. Estimating your net worth. Ever feel like you’re so rich that you can afford to be lazy? Think again. Take a look at your net worth - calculated by Mint.com - and you’ll see exactly where you stand. This means understanding what debt does to your overall financial situation.

4. Setting savings goals. You won’t get very far in any financial endeavor if you can’t do something as simple as saving your money. This means that you will want to take advantage of Mint.com’s saving’s goals features in order to keep yourself organized and free from frivolous spending.

5. Reminding yourself how to manage your finances. Sometimes we have to be rescued from ourselves. It happens to the best of us. Mint.com can send you e-mail reminders that track your spending and tell you when you’ve spent too much money on shopping for the month. Mint.com also alert you to; low balance in your checking account, low available credit, fees and finance charged to your accounts by your bank or investment firms and with Identity theft being one of the world’s fastest growing crimes, you will appreciate mint alert feature to notify you of large or unusual transactions.

Mint.com is owned by Intuit, Inc. the makers of QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax just to name a few. What’s more, it’s free! Test-drive Mint today!

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