Wednesday, 19 August 2009

• Battle of the Online Budget Tools: Is Mint.com the Best?

  
  

  Ahhhh budgeting. It's the backbone of personal finance, isn't it?  And the biggest part of creating a budget is figuring out just where your money is going. And for that, I've tried so many different systems it's not even funny.

   Back in the day when my spending was all cash, I tried to track my spending through receipts. That was just a big mess- with paper and numbers all over the place. Then I tried tracking my spending in an Excel chart, culling the data from my various online accounts. Yeah, apparently I'm too lazy for that.     
  

  What I've been using for the last year or so is the My Portfolio tool that Bank of America offers. It aggregates your various accounts and creates various graphs and charts that represent your spending. What I like about it is that includes student loans, so you get a real picture of what your debt is. What I don't like is the actual interface. I think it's overly cumbersome to change the categories for some expenditures, and it can be a little hard to navigate and read the numerous graphs.

  So I'm thinking about trying Mint. Mint.com is a website that will much of the same thing, but it's supposed to be really easy to work with. It's kind of the hot tool in personal finance these days. There are other sites out there, like Quicken Online or Wesabe, but I've heard such good things about Mint that I'm really tempted to make the switch. Plus, Mint is free. It makes it easier to make the switch so I don't feel like I'm spending money to save it, which is just counterintuitive.
  

  Do you use Mint or one of the other online tools? Would you recommend it?

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