Good Morning DINKS. Today we are discussing how we manage our money. It is said that we will always have money if we consistently spend less money than we earn, but how do you know how much money you are spending? In order to always keep our bottom line in the black, we have to effectively manage our money on a daily and a monthly basis; this means that we have to track our income as well as our expenses.
Some of us may use the old fashioned paper and pen to track our spending and expenses, some of us may use an electronic spreadsheet, and some of us may use online tools from websites and mobile apps to help us manage our money.
Do you use online banking?
Most banks and financial institutions offer free online banking and mobile apps to all of their clients. Online banking allows clients to log into our bank’s website and view all of our bank accounts as well as our recent account transactions with that particular financial institution. Online banking also allows clients to check our current account balances, pay our bills, as well as transfer money to our other checking and savings accounts.
Downloading our financial institutions mobile app allows us to check our up to date account balances, make basic money transfers between our bank accounts, as well as find the closest bank branch or ATM.
I personally love using online banking and mobile apps because I like to keep up to date with all transactions that come into and leave from my checking and savings accounts. There are plenty of mobile banking benefits. Online banking and mobile apps are useful tools for clients, but only if you want to perform transactions and view account balances on your bank accounts with one particular financial institution. If you use multiple banks or if you have credit cards with finance companies then you may want to consider using a money management website to keep track of your personal finances.
Have you tried a money management website?
Money management websites such as Mint.com and Adaptu help you keep track of your money, view your bank accounts, and manage your debts with any and all banks, financial institutions, and finance companies on one website. Money management websites allow clients to join for free, use their service for free, as well as take advantage of their financial information and resources completely for free.
When you chose to register with a third party money management website it is basically one stop shopping for all of our financial needs. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and we can instantly download all of our bank account balances, our bill payment histories, our credit card balances, as well as our mortgage and personal loan information. The major benefit of using a third party money management website to track our personal finances is that we can view all of our accounts with several different financial institutions. We don’t have to log into several different websites in order to keep up to date.
Money management websites like Mint and Adaptu also allow us to set up budgets, determine and work towards achieving your personal financial goals, and sometimes even get advice from financial experts by using their resource centers and financial tools. Online banking is great for performing transactions with one financial institution, but money management websites are great for tracking all of our money, bills, payments, and goals.
Photo by erix
Kristina Tahnyak
Tahnya is a Certified Financial Planner and former Investment Advisor turned marketing and communications professional She holds a degree from Concordia University, is debt free and currently works in the field of digital marketing.
Thanks for mentioning Adaptu!
Anyone know a good money management tool for people living the expat life? We have assets in multiples countries in multiple currencies and we find tools like Mint a bit tricky to use as it very geared for US/Canada market.
@Shawn – you can contact Jenna from Adaptu to see if they have an international platform. I will send your question out on Twitter and let you know if we receive any feedback. Thanks for reading.
I don’t use online tools. I used to use mint for about a year but found it was more work than it was worth. I just use 3 checking accounts and a business checking account to manage my cash. I find it simpler and it works for me.
@Shawn, check out this online personal finance software https://www.inexfinance.com/. They seem to support multiple currencies under the same account, so this may be the solution you need. Although there is no direct sync with banks, you can still import bulk data from .ofx or .csv files. Hope this helps.
MINT has changed my life. Well, really just paying attention to my finances has changed my life, but MINT has made it easy for me to pay attention.
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