MakeUseOf » budget

2 Cool Websites To Track Where Your Money Goes

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:00:01 +0000

In this holiday season, and in these economically challenging times, it pays (pardon the pun) to keep track of our spending so that you don’t allow gift buying and other money related activities to end up setting you back for months and months.

There are several ways how to track money and spending–from simple checkbook tracking, the budget envelop method, to reviewing our online banking statements on a weekly basis.

But there are also a couple of cool websites I recommend, Mint.com and OneReceipt, that can also help keep track of where your money goes.

Mint Holiday Budgeting

I use Mint.com to keep track of my spending, and I have written about the site before. But in this holiday season, if you have never tried Mint or if you’re a current member, you might find it useful to keep a lid on spending for gifts, travel, parties, and decorations by creating a holiday budget.

Essentially, when you sign up on Mint.com, you allow the site to import all the transactions from your bank and credit card accounts. The site gets no control of your accounts, and nor can you or anyone else can use your Mint account to withdraw or deposit money to your financial accounts through Mint. It simply helps you keep track of your spending.

Once you’re set up in Mint you can create a personal budget to monitor your spending. This is the main reason I use Mint. For as John Maxwell says, “A budget is people telling their money where to go instead of wondering where it went.”

For the holiday season, you could also create a budget for gifts, travel, parties, decorations, etc. to help you stay within your spending limit.

To set up a budget, first determine what amount of your income you have left after required expenses (rent, mortgage, loans, grocery, food, utilities, etc) have been met. This money is your expendable income—what you can afford to spend after required expense are dealt with.

Now in your Mint.com account set up a budget so you can keep track of your spending and stay within the limits of your budget. Mint will automatically send you a notice when you go over a budget item.

For more about how to use Mint.com, see my article here.

OneReceipt

If you need to not only keep track of your spending but also the receipts of your purchases, you might want to give OneReceipt a try. This modest, well designed site allows you to email online receipts to your OneReceipt account where the essential information is grabbed and displayed for later reviewing and download if needed.

While it’s quite easy to save receipts on your computer, OneReceipt can be used as either a backup system for your receipts and/or a place to manage your receipts and spending. For your non-online receipts you can snap a photo of your paper receipts and email them to your account for processing.

Your account comes with a fairly broad list of categories including Entertainment, Food & Dining, Kids, Home, Web Hosting, but for some odd reason I don’t see a way to create custom categories. You can however create custom tags.

OneReceipt not only grabs information about your online purchases, it also provides you a running total of your purchases, and thus you have another way of tracking your spending.

As your OneReceipt account starts to fill up you can sort receipts by time frame, price range, categories and tags.

The site will also send you monthly alerts about your spending; and you can view a chart breakdown where your money is going.

Let us know what you think of these online tools for personal financing. And for other ideas on how to track money, see The 3 Best Free Personal Finance Managers for iPhone and Manage Your Budget & Expenses Using Google Budgeting Tools.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Make Sense of Your Daily Spending With The Birdy – A Dead Simple Personal Finance Tracker

Saikat Basu — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:00:10 +0000

Personally speaking, I like simple tools. That’s why I dive into the MakeUseOf Directory and mine it for something that’s useful and simple. This time around I found The Birdy which as a personal finance tool is as simple as they come.

Anyone who hates the sight of a balance sheet will tell you that handling and managing household finance is often an arduous task. Heck, it’s even a marital bone of contention. That’s where The Birdy steps in with its dead simple one-email-a-day approach.

Of course, you can easily use something like Google Calendar or even a “spends and expenses” notebook, but The Birdy takes your simple financial entries and uses simple graphs to explain where you are spending your salary on. Plus, it reminds you daily with an email.

Let’s head for the (free) registration page and enter The Birdy.

How Does The Birdy Help Track Your Spending

You just have to watch your inbox. At a user-defined time, the personal finance tracker will send you an email. Here’s how the first email from The Birdy looks like:

As explained in the email, tracking your expenses for the day simply involves listing them down – one item per line. What’s of special interest are the hashtags used to format each of your expense items on the list.

The Purpose of HashTags to Track Your Expenses

Inspired by Twitter’s hashtags, The Birdy also uses hashtags to categorize your spending. Categorization helps in finally narrowing down your expenses to major spends like food, clothing, education etc. You can enter any hashtag you want for your purchases and even multiple ones for an individual purchase. For instance, you can put down a business lunch expense as both #food and #business. By adding multiple hashtags, The Birdy lets you emulate the arrangement of categories and sub-categories.

The Dashboard – Control Room for Tracking Your Finances

The Dashboard is where you can make sense of all your spending. It is dominated by the large pie-graph you see on the screen.

The Birdy gives you a few more options to enter your spends – you can of course, email them daily; you can also text them if you are in the U.S.; and you can enter them manually by clicking on the green Add a purchase button. The Add a purchase button is helpful for quickly entering details if you happen to have been amiss in entering your details for a day or more.

You can also look into the Calendar for a day by day view of expenses. Clicking on a date opens a pop-up with the individual hashtagged details.

The details come from the Purchases page. You can edit the details or delete them altogether. You can sort all your purchases by tags (which act as categories) or by age (Newest / Oldest). A CSV export of your purchase expenses is also provided.

The Tags page is the place where you can manage all your tags. You can combine two tags to bring separate expense heads together. You can of course, edit individual tags and modify their names if you wish.

First impressions could make you think that The Birdy is for U.S. only (only the text sms service is). That’s not so, as you can see on the Account Settings page. The Birdy supports major international currencies. Set the currency of choice, the time zone, and the time when you would like to receive the email, and you are pretty much set to track your daily expenses in a super simple way.

An iPhone, Android, or mobile app would have completed the picture…maybe, that’s in the near future (there’s a poll on the blog asking for desired features).

I am not too much for finance and complex financial tracking. The Birdy does not connect to my bank accounts; it remains a simple and secure tool to keep me within my budgets. How about your fiscal discipline? Is The Birdy easy as pie for you?

Control Your Finances & Master Your Expenses With Money Manager Ex

Ryan Dube — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:30:53 +0000

When it comes to personal finances, there are three types of people. There’s the person without any budget whatsoever, there’s the person that tries to keep track of everything mentally (and fails), and then there’s the person that tracks and accounts for every penny.

No matter what end of the range you fall into, it’s never to late to sort out your finances and try to find out why you keep falling short (or nearly so) every single month. It really doesn’t always come down to how much you make, sometimes a healthy financial life boils down to understanding where all the money is going.

Most people just don’t want to take the time to sit down and go over every excruciating detail of a “budget”. And doesn’t the word “budget” sound boring and drab? Seriously – who wants to spend a Saturday afternoon budgeting when you could be spending it at the mall and going out for some Chinese food?

Well – maybe that’s half the problem. Lucky for you, I’m going to share a free, open-source money manager software that Damien previously mentioned very briefly, called Money Manager Ex that’s going to make it very easy to organize your finances, create a budget and monitor where all your money is flying off to.

Quickly Create Your Financial Database

This app is a little bit like ClearCheckBook, which Daniel covered in 2008. However, I do think this one offers much more functionality. In Money Manager Ex, each “account” is called a Database. When you first launch the software, you can get started by clicking on “Create a New Database.”

The next step is to pick your currency. From the list, you’ll see that this software isn’t just your run-of-the-mill U.S. currency only application. The developers have really taken the global community into account.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is create your bank accounts. Later, this will be automated, but to get started you should create each account and fill in all the details. Create a new account by clicking the “New Account” button in the icon bar.

It doesn’t really matter what you put for the balance, because later you’ll be importing the actual details and transactions from your real bank account.

To get an accurate picture of your overall financial standing, you’ll want to go through each category in Money Manager Ex and add any accounts, investments, funds, and assets that you may own. Assets include things like property, cars, jewelry or artwork.

When you have all of your assets and accounts set up, it’s time to create your budget. Create a new budget for the year, and you’ll see the center pane populated with a template budget. If you already have a list of your bills and your income, just go through this and add all of those items in.

If you don’t have a list yet, well then now is the time to take stock of all of the bills you owe. The template makes this process a lot less painful, and it will remind you of things you pay that you probably normally forget about. Don’t forget to also add your income items into the budget as well!

Now, unless you have the time to start manually typing in all of your bank transactions in order to keep the software synced to your bank account, you’re going to want to export/import your bank data for each account. Money Manager Ex can import QIF and CSV files, so check with your bank website to see what format you can export to.

This will bring in all of the transactions. The one somewhat time-consuming job you’ll be left with is to categorize each transaction. This is worthwhile though, because it will make the reporting features of the software much more helpful – and could very well reveal to you where the money-drain is in your checkbook.

The final task you’ll need to do is to click on “Repeating Transactions” in the left nav and add all of your current bills. These are expected, predictable bills that you receive and pay every month, with a known due date. This helps the software automate some of the updates, and also provides from better future predictions in the reporting section.

Speaking of which, the bulk of the left navigation is taken up by all of the reports that you can use to examine your financial standing in a very graphical way. You can see where most of your income comes from, where most of your outgoing money goes, a full transaction report for a certain time frame, and much more. This is the area that makes this money manager software so valuable.

Budgeting and managing finances is never fun. If you’re anything like me, you’re too busy trying to earn a living, to sit down and nit-pick where every penny goes. But I can tell you that this is one money management app that won’t take away too much of your precious time.

Just take the time to add your budget and assets once, and all you have to do is export transactions from your bank account to get regular updates on your financial health and well-being.

Give Money Manager Ex a try and see if it helps you uncover any low-hanging fruit in your spending habits. Did it help you get your budget in place? Share your experiences with the software in the comments section below.

Mint Adds Much Wanted Features To Its iPhone App [News]

Bakari Chavanu — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:00:02 +0000

Last Friday, the personal finance and budgeting service, Mint.com, released an upgraded version of their iPhone app. Now users can manually add transactions, and on top of that use the geolocation features of the app and iPhone to locate input data for where they made the transaction.

Basically, the only required typing for the app is adding numbers. Mint’s app was selected as one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2011.

By using Mint.com, members can have the free service download all their online banking and other financial transactions, and in turn use that information for creating a powerful budgeting system and setting up financial goals. The service can also help users save money, pay off credit cards, make financial investments, and plan for retirement.

Though Mint automatically downloads online transactions, the new upgrades are not only useful for cash transactions, but they also serve the purpose of adding and keeping track of pending transactions not yet posted to a respective account—e.g., bank, credit or debit card. When the transaction you added manually is updated in the respective account, Mint will automatically reconcile the pending transaction. If there’s no match, you will have to manually reconcile the pending spending to your account, Mint says in their article about use to the new feature. You can also of course delete manual transactions when they are no longer needed.

These features are one of many that dedicated Mint users have been requesting for quite sometime. Others include the ability to record receipts.

(Source: CNET News)

Watch Your Spending & Control Your Budget With These 8 Free Budget Calculators

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:31:16 +0000

Any personal finance adviser will tell you that developing and maintaining a financial budget is the best way to meet monthly expenses, save for financial emergencies and plan for the future. Keeping a budget basically means totaling your income for the month and subtracting the total of all your expenses. A budget calculator allows you to itemize your expenses so you can see where all your spending is going, especially for non-fixed discretionary items like groceries, music downloads, fast food, entertainment, computer software and the like that may be keeping you from paying off your credit debts or building a sufficient savings account.

Mint is one of the best free online budgeting systems, but if you don’t think you need something that elaborate, there are several other free sites for doing month-to-month budget calculations.

The Budget Calculator

This aptly named budget calculator is straightforward and includes expense boxes for many of the most typical types of fixed and non-fixed expenses—rent or mortgage, electricity, water, phone, Internet, etc. You need to input of course what applies to your personal finances. It also contains boxes for monthly savings, IRA, and investments.

After you enter the amounts and press “Calculate Budget” you can view and print out your budget for the month. As the site points out, “If the amount you get is a negative number check your expenses and savings to find out what is causing you to spend more than you make, and if you have money left over, put more money into savings or put it towards ‘Fun and Entertainment‘”.

Budget Calculator

This calculator is not as extensive as the one above, but if your expenses are limited to the basics – rent or mortgage, one or two credit cards, car loan, entertainment, etc – then this calculator is useful for quick results.

College Budgeting Calculator

If going to college is in your plans, the banking website, Chase.com, has a free student loan and budget calculator that computes your assets. This includes job income, scholarships, grants, parents/other, and your expenses – tuition, books and fees, room board, etc.

Free Financial Advice

Free Financial Advice also has a basic budget calculator, but it also features lots of short article advice for personal finance management and savings, including investing for beginners, ideas for earning extra money, saving gas, clothing, computer software, landscaping, paying off debts, etc.

Free Financial Advice doesn’t require you to register or provide your email.

DebtSteps

DebtSteps has three extensive budget and loan calculators – Free Household Budget Form, Mortgage Payment Calculator, and a Credit Card Payoff Calculator.

When you click on the household budget form, select the Print View option at the bottom of the page, and you will get a very extensive list for income and assets boxes, and numerous one for expenses – including unsecured debts, and gifts and donations.

Home Budget Calculator

Home Budget Calculator does what the above calculators do, but it includes two other unique features. It provides data boxes for you and your spouse’s income as well as more specific data, such as your tax withholdings, FICA, and retirement deductions or expenses.

The calculator also includes a visual pie chart that depicts your monthly expenses.

Frugalpig

Frugalpig is a site dedicated to providing readers with tips and strategies for frugal living. It includes its own budget calculator for finding what the site calls “budget leaks”. If you need or want an old fashion pen and paper method for budgeting, you can also download the site’s free PDF family budget worksheet.

Frugalpig also provides lots of tips about saving money on groceries, gas, home expenses, entertainment, and shopping in general.

Bankrate

When you get into the habit of creating and maintaining a budget, you will typically start looking for how you can tighten your budget to either meet monthly expenses, pay off a huge debt, or create emergency savings.

Bankrate has a budget calculator as well, but it also includes several other budget calculators for mortgages, auto loans, credit card transfers, and home equity calculations.

Also, check out these articles for other online and software tools about budget keeping:

Manage Your Money Safely with ClearCheckbook – Daniel
Save Money and Track Your Finances with Mint – Karl
How To Use Mint To Manage Your Budget & Spendings Online – Bakari

Let us know what you think of these sites and which online financial tools you have found useful for controlling your budget.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

4 Great Set Of Plugins For Linux Users

Danny Stieben — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 17:31:43 +0000

We know that there are numerous open source programs that find their home in both Windows and Linux. Many of these turn out to be among the apps that we use daily. However, did you know that you can get certain plugins only for Linux? Plus if a plugin exists for Windows, Linux lets you easily install them. Let’s find out what they are.

FX-Foundry For GIMP

FX-Foundry is a great set of plugins for GIMP to make image manipulation a lot easier with cool effects. It’s more than likely that everything an active graphics or image editor will need is included in this pack, because the menu dedicated to FX-Foundry is pretty extensive.

The plugins can be installed from their website by downloading the .tar file and extracting all the individual files into the correct directories. In this way Windows users can use the same plugins. However, compared to the Linux way this is a difficult procedure. Fedora, for example, has these plugins packaged up, so it’s simply a matter of selecting the checkbox while you’re installing GIMP. You should check your distribution for whether they have the plugins packaged or not because availability varies from distro to distro.

Thunderbird Plugin For Libnotify

Many GNOME-based distributions often have libnotify as a common way to show notifications from multiple programs. The programs that come with the distribution by default will all probably have support for this notification system, but once you start installing other programs, things start to look a bit different. If the program doesn’t have native support for libnotify, then your only hope is for a plugin that will do the job.

Thunderbird has its own notification system and looks out of place when it appears. However, there’s a plugin to fix that! Simply get the plugin from here, install it, go over the settings, and you’re done! All the notifications should go over libnotify now. Don’t forget to turn off Thunderbird’s default notifications, otherwise you’ll see your messages twice.

GnuCash Finance::Quote Plugin

In case you’ve played around with the Windows version of GnuCash, you’ll maybe have noticed that a few select features do not work without the specific Finance::Quote plugin. Written in Perl, this plugin allows the program to download quotes about stocks, currencies, and whatever else the world offers. Since the developers can’t force you to install Perl on Windows (which isn’t exactly easy), they leave that plugin out and let you install it if you really need it. However, in Linux, that won’t be an issue. For all distros that I’ve ever used, the plugin came automatically with the installation of GnuCash. How cool is that?

Banshee Plugins

Unless you closely follow a handful of Linux programs, it’ll come as a surprise to you that there are currently Windows builds for Banshee, a great music player. I haven’t tried out the Windows app myself, but I’m pretty sure that they have added a couple of plugins. Though once you get to the Linux side, you’ll notice that there are a lot of plugins for this app. Just search for Banshee in your repository and handfuls of plugins will start showing up along with it, ready to install. Just look at the screenshot for some of the many that I have installed!

Conclusion

The highly customizable nature of Linux is demonstrated by these easy to install plugins that can definitely make your user experience better. The great thing about plugins that are installed via package management systems is that they automatically update when there’s a new release pushed to the repositories. New versions let you enjoy more features and tighter security.

Are there any plugins that you really enjoy in Linux? Share them with us in the comments!

Image Credit: Flickr

7 Tools To Help You Develop A Solid Financial Savings Plan

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 17:31:03 +0000

Although credit cards make it easy for us to purchase the things we want, we all know they can make our purchases harder to pay off. So why not consider developing a savings plan rather than an interest debt for your next major purchase or long-term goal? Whether you’re saving for college, retirement, a new computer, or a vacation, having a savings plan could help you achieve your goal.

There are several online calculators that work similar to using formulas in Excel spreadsheets. These calculators help you see more clearly how much money you can save over time by cutting back on spending or making better choices about the purchases you make. A savings plan means you may still buy the things you want or need, but you do so by not incurring more expenses.

Budgeting & Saving Using Mint

First off, in order to make your goal(s) attainable, you will probably need to budget your spending in order to start saving or increase your savings. One online service you might try for this entire budgeting and savings process is Mint. Back in June I reviewed how to use this free service to develop a budgeting plan. Since then, Mint.com has added another feature, aptly called Goals.

Mint makes it super easy to set up a savings plan for nearly any type of goal, including paying off a debt, buying a car, taking a trip, buying a home, or saving for retirement. If none of their template plans fit your needs, you can customize your own.

Mint.com will keep you updated about the progress of your savings plan. Setting up a Mint.com account, a budget, and a savings account require a little time, but the site features work so well together that it’s worth the effort.

Savings Calculator

Another calculator which you can use without registering an account is found on Dinkytown. This calculator includes formulations for college savings, a savings plan for buying a home, and how much you could possibly save by not smoking, drinking, or over shopping.

It can even provide calculations for how much you might save each month by bagging your lunch instead of eating out. Want to make a cool million? It will show how to develop a savings plan for that too. When you actually see these numbers, it may very well make you realize how attainable your goals actually are. Matter of fact, the calculator will even show you how much it”˜s costing you to delay any type of savings plan.

College Savings Planner

If you’re looking to start a savings plan for your children”˜s college education, you might take a look at Vanguard’s College Savings Planner.

The calculator provides a rough estimate of how much you will need to set aside based on the tuition (in-state or out-of-state) and the type of college your child might attend.

Savings With Interests

If you’re looking to start a long-term savings plan, many online bank and credit unions includes savings calculators.

Mappingyourfuture.com provides a really simple savings calculator that computes anticipated future savings based on an initial deposit, monthly savings, interest rates, and number of years. The site also provides tips for saving for college and paying off student loans.

Savings Calculator For Your Website

If your savings plan involves the visitors to your website, Frograte provides a set of formula calculations, including loan, mortgage, and credit card debts.

Posting the calculations and code on your site may be useful for an organization involved in a collective savings plan. Frograte says that their “savings calculator is based on monthly compounding, check the details of your account for the compounding period. Accounts that are compounded daily, or yearly will vary slightly from the calculated results”.

Energy Savings Calculator

Developing a savings plan is just not limited to what you can set aside from your income. You might be able to save based on upgrading your refrigerator, or getting rid of your clunker and purchasing a new car.

Engerystar.com provides a calculator to help you determine how much you might save by buying an energy savings refrigerator.

New vs Used Car Calculator

Similarly, if you’re needing to purchase a car, AOL.com provides a handy calculator for determining how much you might save buying a new car as opposed to a used one.

By using one of the above or similar calculators, you can get a more factual estimate of your savings goals as opposed to just guessing off the top of your head.

Let us know of other calculators and money saving tips you know about.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

Create a Budget in Minutes with Sprouty

Nancy Messieh — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 17:30:52 +0000

Do you find that when you try to use a budgeting system, the more complicated it is, the more overwhelmed you become; and eventually you stop using it? If that’s the case, Sprouty brings a simplified budgeting system that makes it easy to create a monthly budget, and more importantly, stick to it.

Sometimes keeping it simple is a lot more useful and that’s exactly what Sprouty aims to do. Unlike Mint and other popular money management systems, your personal bank account information does not even come into play; making it a secure option that can be used no matter where in the world you live.

After signing up for a free account, Sprouty will prompt you to enter your monthly income, and will attempt to create a budget for you, based on minimum recommended amounts for each budget item.

Of course, the budget will most probably not reflect your own personal spending habits, and you can modify it to suit your lifestyle.

You can add additional budget items by clicking on the ‘Create a Budget’ button, determine the amount allocated to that category, and add tags. Using the same method, you can add additional sources of income, which is particularly useful for a family in which there are several breadwinners.

Existing budget items can also be edited or deleted by clicking on any given item, adding or removing tags of your choice, and adjusting the amount. This will be one of the very first steps you take when using Sprouty, in order to adjust the budget to suit your personal needs.

Once you have your budget in place, you can begin to add the actual transactions as they occur. New transactions are accompanied by the date, tags or description, and the amount.

As you add tags, Sprouty will also suggest tags that are commonly used.

If you add a transaction by mistake, it can easily be edited or deleted by clicking on any part of the transaction’s information.

Sprouty’s best feature is undoubtedly the overview it provides of your spending. Once you have your budget in place and have added your transactions, you can see a monthly overview of your budget, and see exactly where your money is being spent, and what remains.

This is especially useful because you are able to visualise the areas in which you spend the most, and this could make for an easier way to understand where you need to cutback on your spending.

Sprouty is as no-frills a budget system as they come, but sometimes that is all that you need. It is extremely user-friendly, with barely any learning curve at all.

The website can be accessed from mobile browsers, making it possible to add transactions on the go. That said, it is not optimised for a mobile browser, and that would be one of the first welcome changes to the site. Adding transactions while you’re out and about is an integral part of the success of any budget system, so that payments don’t fall between the cracks. Whether it is a mobile website, adding transactions by email, or any other method, it will definitely improve Sprouty’s user friendly service.

How do you keep track of your spending habits? Let us know in the comments.

Compare Services And Reduce Your Bills With BillShrink

Steve Campbell — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:31:13 +0000

It happens to all of us. You sign up for a service – like cable or a cell phone – and you use it for months and months, only to find later on that you could have got a better deal. One of the easiest ways to save extra money is to cut down on your bills, but that usually means calling different carriers or researching online to find the best rates.

Back when we first covered BillShrink in our directory, it was solely for comparing phone plans. Even then we knew it was a very useful comparison site that could reduce bills and save you money. Well now you can save even more because BillShrink offers comparisons of not only cell phones, but credit cards, gas stations, CD rates, and even television.

In this article, I am going to cover all of BillShrink’s features, showcasing the various ways you can reduce your bills and save money with the service. Even if you’re locked into a plan or don’t currently want to switch, BillShrink has something you’ll find useful. Besides, it is always a good idea to know where you stand, as well as what the competition is when negotiating rates.

BillShrink – A Free Way To Save Money

BillShrink is an unbiased, independent company that allows you to compare different services and plans. It enables you to see how much you will save in real-time and provides you with links to various retailers so you can go and sign up for your new services quickly. You can also setup BillShrink to monitor plans and alert you when there are any new ways to save.

For an excellent overview of how BillShrink works, watch this Howcast video:

You can also check out BillShrink’s Facebook page for more information. They have a very nice welcome tab, I must say.

Wireless Service

BillShrink has always incorporated wireless service into its features since – let’s be honest – wireless bills are where people tend to get screwed over the most. Pricing plans fluctuate so much between different plans and services, and a lot of the time you’re confused as to what you are actually paying for. It is especially tough when you consider that a lot of plans lock you into a 2 year deal.

On BillShrink, just select the Wireless service tab, fill out your information (current carrier, current cost), and hit Go>>. BillShrink will then ask you for your usage information, which – in most cases – you can sign into your service provider and grant BillShrink access to the statistics.

After BillShrink has all the necessary information, you can begin viewing potential savings. You can enter your email address so the service remembers your settings, also.

Credit Cards

For credit cards its the same thing. Just select the information pertaining to your credit usage and hit Go>>. Then you will have to fill out a little more information to narrow down what you’re looking to accomplish with the service. Whether you’re looking to get a new credit card or are attempting to get your very first one, BillShrink can accommodate you.

Savings & CDs

BillShrink can also find you the best rates on Savings and CDs. After you fill out how much you could afford to save each month, BillShrink will search through hundreds of savings accounts, finding and matching you with the ones that best fit your saving profile. It also computes the amount you will earn in interest per year, minus fees.

Gas Stations

Finding the cheapest gas stations is something everyone should be able to take advantage of immediately. Enter in your most frequent destinations (i.e. home, work) and make/model of your car and BillShrink will find and display all of the cheapest gas stations in your area using Google maps.

Television Service

The television service feature on BillShrink is listed as beta, but there’s really nothing beta about it. To compare cable and satellite bills, enter in your address, current provider, and how much you currently pay to see how much you could be saving with an alternate service. BillShrink makes sure to only list the services available in your area, which I thought was pretty cool.

Conclusion

If you use BillShrink properly, you can potentially reduce your bills and save yourself a lot of money. It’s a pretty straight forward service and is generally very easy to use and navigate. BillShrink is definitely one of the sites I will be incorporating into my money-saving arsenal (along with Mint).

What do you think of BillShrink? Do you use any other online services to save money? Leave a comment below!

How To Use Mint To Manage Your Budget & Spendings Online

Bakari Chavanu — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:30:54 +0000

When I recently discovered that my local bank had finally been added to Mint, I immediately signed back up. MakeUseOf did an overview of Mint back in 2007 when it was in its beta release. Since then, it has grown and added more features so it’s time for an update post.

Mint is a free, automatic online finance tracking and budgeting platform much like Microsoft Money and Quicken. Since adding my financial accounts (Paypal, credit cards, banking), I”˜ve stopped using similar software applications on my Mac and iPhone. Mint does all the personal accounting work for me. In this article, I’ll share some tips on using the features of Mint to track and budget your spending.

How to Make a Mint Budget – Setting Up Categories

When you add your financial accounts to your Mint account, about a year’s worth of your past and current transactions get added to your account. Using your past transactions, Mint assigns your transactions to various categories. For example, credit or debit card transactions you make at Target will be assigned the Shopping category. A transaction from Best Buy will get assigned to Electronics & Software. You may find that many of your transactions get assigned appropriate categories, but you can also change or create categories for any transaction.

Here’s how to do it.

Open your Mint account and click on Transactions in the menu bar at the top of the webpage. Select the transaction for the category you want to change.

Select the current category for the transaction and click on the triangle in the selection field to either change the name of the category or see if there’s a sub-category. So if say your transaction is from Amazon, you can leave the default category as Shopping or you can assign it a sub-category, such as Books or Clothing.
Now that you have changed the category, you will probably want all future transactions from say Amazon to all be labeled Books instead of just Shopping. To make this happen, you need to change the rules set up for this type of transaction. Click on the Edit Detail tab.

In the resulting dialog box, select “Always rename Amazon as Amazon and categorize as Books.” This new rule will change all existing and future Amazon transactions. Notice also, you can assign tags to transactions, which is great for keeping track of tax related expenses as opposed to personal expenses. By clicking “Manage your tags“ï»¿, you can change, add, and delete tags.

When you first set up your account and add transactions, you may find there are numerous transactions which are uncategorized. Taking the time to set up rules for uncategorized transactions will inevitably help you monitor your spending. Also, one useful tool in this regard is that you can click on the “Show all“ï»¿ button on the right side of your Transactions page to get a list of the total spending for all transactions for a particular category, sub-category, or store.

Setting Budgets

One of the best reasons for using Mint and taking the trouble to categorize transactions is that you can make Mint budgets, especially for discretionary spending items and services. For example, I like to make sure I’m spending a limited amount of money on books and iPad/iPhone apps per month. If I don’t monitor my spending on such items, I tend to overspend and even sometimes waste money by not tracking those expenses.

Again, when you set up your Mint account, Mint creates a few default budgets which you can change or create new ones. To do this, click on Planning in the menu bar of your account’s page. Select the budget you want to change or update. Or click the Create Budget button to create a new budget.

For an existing budget, you can increase or decrease the amount by clicking on the left and right triangles. You can make additional changes by clicking the Edit Details tab, in which you can change the time period of the budget, and check whether or not you want the selected budget to roll over to the next month. As you spend money toward those budgets, the bar color will change from green to red when you are over your budget.

Almost everything about Mint is automatic. So once your transactions are updated for your accounts, all your categories and budgets get automatically updated. You never have to manually input that data.

Setting Up Email Alerts

Another useful Mint feature which helps you monitor your finances is by sending you email alerts for when you’ve gone over budget, when your balance is low, when a bill is due, and so on. You can configure the settings for alerts by clicking on Your Profile on your accounts page. In the drop-down box, select Email and Alerts to set up changes.

Get the Free Mint iPhone App

If you”˜re an Apple mobile user, you can download the free Mint app to view your online account. Transactions, however, may not immediately show up on your Mint account. It may take an hour or two to get updated. But using the mobile app also allows you to add tags and/or change categories for new transactions. Your new alerts also show up in the app.

There are many more features in Mint, and once you get your accounts set up, you’ll see that it provides you with a wealth of information about your finances, as well giving you tips on how to save money.

Mint.com may not be the best solution for say tracking a large business account, but for personal and small business accounts, the service is a huge time saver. The biggest drawback to the service, however, is that it doesn’t provide a way to print out reports of your transactions, categories, and summaries. You have to download the data and then set up a spreadsheet to create reports. Hopefully the developers of Mint will address this problem in future updates.

Let us know if and how you use Mint.com. Has it helped you budget your spending?