One more day and I am rounding the last corner of the fast. Today, my focus was finances one last time, but this time I wanted to summarize all of the things I've learned over this time into one final task. And today, I stumbled upon my task while helping out a friend.
I was asked by one of my friends to give her the budgeting template I talked about a few posts ago. I created this spreadsheet in Excel that itemizes all of your income and expenses and calculates what you should have left after you have paid all of those bills, bought groceries, etc. It's somewhat like balancing your checkbook, but you can plan ahead as well so that you can see exactly where your money is going and when you may need to adjust in some areas before you hit a tough patch.
While I was formatting the spreadsheet for my friend, I had a great idea. I was thinking, what if I could add some functionality to the spreadsheet that would send you a reminder email when a bill is due, or help you calculate how to pay off debt in a certain time frame like I planned earlier in the fast? Then I began thinking that maybe I could create a website that would do this for its users in addition to many other financial planning tools. I was so excited because I may just have the NEXT BIG IDEA!
Of course, I had to go online and do my research to make sure there wasn't anyone else in that marketplace....and low and behold....www.mint.com was the very first website that popped up! This website does everything I was thinking of - it was astounding how anyone could possibly have thought of my brilliant idea before me! I was seriously cracking up. Of course someone has already thought of this!
Regardless, since this amazing website already exists, I made my task for today to sign up at mint.com so that we have our own personal financial advisor online! In the tool, you upload all of your bank accounts, credit card bills, loans, and investments (with the highest security). If you have online access to these accounts, all you have to do is login and they bring in all of the information for you. Then you can create your budget, which was actually uploaded from my bank when I logged in because I had created one on the bank's website a couple of weeks ago. That was impressive!
You can set up all kinds of alerts so that you are notified when an event happens which you can set. For example, you can have an alert for when your balance hits a certain amount, or when your bills are due, or even when you've gone over your budget in any category. I think this will be very helpful to us as we try to maintain our budget more consistently. You can also set up financial goals and the tool tracks how you are progressing towards those goals. They also have tools that will estimate your tax refund quickly which, for me, allowed me to see which would be better: if me and my husband file together or separately.
Overall, I think this website can be one of the best things that has happened to our budget. I haven't learned all of the functionality yet, but I am excited to explore the site as I am steadily improving our finances! You should check it out too! If you are concerned with the safety of placing all of your information in a central website location, which is totally understandable, check out this link that details the security measures taken by the site to ensure that your information is safe.
Happy Budgeting!
great idea!
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