I love the idea of knowing where my money is going. More importantly – so does my husband since he doesn’t handle the finances. He only occasionally asks about the bank account when he sees me come home from a long day of Saturday shopping and multiple bags in hand.
I was raised not to spend more than you make and if you can’t pay for it today, you don’t have to have it. Well, the world says otherwise so I need all the help I can get to help me monitor my money and plan for an uncertain future.
Now that the hubby and I are both out of college, we have more than $3.42 in the joint checking account. This joint account and more lax spending has made it much more difficult to even keep a checkbook, much less balance the register.
Enter Mint.com
A friend of mine told me about mint.com almost a year ago. It was the coolest thing for household budgeting since Microsoft Money 🙂 A free online tool for aggregating all of your online bank accounts plus a way to budget those expenditures by providing amazing reports including a comparison of your spending with the country. Anything from credit scores to retirement planning.
As soon as she walked out of my house, I got online to set up my account. JD and I bank with a small-town, one branch credit union that barely had online banking. To my dismay, I couldn’t proceed forward without connecting a bank account to the system. There was a place to request your bank become part of the system, so I completed the form, without any real hope of it coming online.
I was thinking about mint.com tonight since JD is out for a boys’ night and thought I’d try again. We now have a mortgage, so I thought if nothing else I could at least set up a budget and enter things in manually. I was completely shocked when I searched for my credit union, that they came up on the results!!
So, I completed my registration and I’m now well on my way to having a firm understanding of where all my money is going. I would encourage others to do the same. I’m sure they will find that all of their money is being spent on Halo and McDonald’s, but at least you’ll know where it’s going 🙂
More than Cookie Dough 