Entering into a Brave New World
It’s the first payday of the year, so I figured I better get cracking on my financial plan. Step one was to get a grasp on all of my finances. I previously signed up for Mint.com, but I wasn’t using it to it’s full potential. Now I plan to use it in earnest. If you don’t know what Mint.com is, you are missing out on one of the greatest sites on the internet–and it’s FREE! Mint.com allows you to enter all of your financial information into a their site, and it will automatically update your balances, gives you alerts about upcoming bills, allows you to see how you’ve been spending your money by category, and helps you to create a monthly budget, which it will track and tell you if you’re on target or not. You can also track your investments, and get a bunch of reports including spending by merchant and your net worth over time. You’re probably leery about putting all of your info into a single site, but the good thing about Mint.com is that it is view only–you can only see your balances, you can’t make any payments or transfer any money. It’s also secure, using the same encryption that your financial institutions use.
I know it sounds too good to be true, but it isn’t. Mint.com is free, no catch. The way they make their money is by analyzing your accounts giving you money-saving offers in the form of lower interest credit cards, loans or brokerage accounts. There’s no obligation to apply for anything. The only thing I’m cautious about is that Mint.com was purchased last year by Quicken Financial, which serves as a testimony to what a popular site it is. I’ve run into a couple of problems with the site, in that a few of my accounts can’t be added, which gives me an incomplete picture, and sometimes accounts you’ve added run into problems and the balances aren’t updated. The second one is minor and only occurs on occasion.
I’ve also checked with all of my accounts to see which ones offer an auto-pay option. The good news is most of them do, and most of them will allow me to enter the information online. There are a couple of accounts that don’t, but I can still do those online manually. The only bad thing I ran across was there were a couple of accounts that require you to send a voided check. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that I’m totally out of checks. The last time I wrote a check prior to a couple of days ago was in December 2007! It’s rather ironic that I’ll have to order checks in order to start going paperless. As the saying goes, “You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.” I’m going to call my Credit Union tomorrow to order the least expensive checks I can get.
The last step I did tonight was to create a schedule of payments for all of my accounts for the entire year. It didn’t take too long, thanks to the magic of spreadsheets & autofill, but it still took me a couple of hours to log on to all of my accounts, get the payment info, then enter it into Quicken. You might be tempted to ask why I’d still be using Quicken if I’m using Mint.com. The answer is simple. With Quicken, I can enter future entries, and see how my current spending will affect the big picture. Mint.com only displays what has been spent, not what you’re going to be spending for the entire year. I’ll keep on posting about this as I make more progress, since it might be something you might be interested in checking into to.
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