Getting your personal finances under control can be a daunting task. The first step in this process is getting an accurate glimpse of your current situation. Unfortunately, the process of doing it is a bit of a hurtle for most people.
Gathering all your income information, expenses, retirement accounts, real estate, automobiles and the list goes on. Then once you do have all that information collected where and how do you begin to compile it into useful information. This can be especially difficult if some of the information is in electronic form, and some are paper statements or online. As mentioned earlier it can be a daunting task.
Let’s not even get into categorizing expenses and creating budgets. Without your own personal Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or a great working knowledge of spreadsheets you might find yourself spending hours just to try to understand your current financial state. Never mind trying to determine where to make changes in order to get things back on track.
Fortunately, there is a free online personal financial management service that’s the next-best thing to having your own CPA. The website is www.Mint.com. Mint.com gives you a slew of free services once you populate it with your financial account information. First off, it gives you a collective, up to date view of all of your financial accounts. Mint.com provides tools to categorize all your income and expenses so that you can then create reports on your finances. Their graphs and report are amazing and they allow you to create categories as you need them. These graphs are excellent tools to allow you to understand your cash flow on a monthly, quarterly or whatever time frame you want to trend.
Their site is very easy to populate with your information and it’s all done securely. Again this is a great tool for you to track your spending so that you can make adjustments to your spending or savings goals. They also have a great budgeting feature that helps you create a budget for any expense. They also have a great mobile app so that even on the go you can monitor your financial health. The mobile app is a really great tool for frequent travelers. The biggest benefit this site is that it gives you the ability to quickly view your current financial state. This article is not a thorough review of Mint.com as I have only glazed over its tools.
The site www.mint.com is a great free (they do hit you up with subtle advertisements) tool. It provides great value and can help you to quickly get financially organized. So check it out, www.mint.com. Also if you appreciate this tip and are looking for other tid bits of good life information then checkout www.uncomplexed.com.