Monday, November 29, 2010

how to budget personal finances

In the digital age, nobody likes carrying a lot of cash around – I know I don’t, anyway. This can be especially frustrating when you go to keep track of your expenses, who you owe money to, who you lent some to and just where it all goes over the month.

As always, there are a lot of apps out there to help you do various things with your money. There are apps to figure out how to manage your money, oversee expenses, send money to people, keep track of who owes you, and more.

In this article, I’ll show you some of the applications you can take advantage of to do everything I’ve mentioned here, leaving you free to pick and choose the apps that will make your life easier.

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How to Manage Your Money

I’m beginning to learn just how difficult managing your expenses can be. For the most part, I use my debit card tied to my checking account to make purchases. I use it at the grocery store, when I go out to lunch with my coworkers and on the weekend when I’m out exploring the city.

At the end of the month, my bank statement looks pretty ridiculous. All of these small transactions make it difficult to sift through. I still know what everything is, but if I wanted to see where I could be saving some money I wouldn’t know the first place to look.

Sounds like you? Even if it doesn’t, you could still reap the benefits of visually being able to manage your money. These apps make the process a lot easier.

Mint

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Mint has been on our radar since back in 2007 when Karl wrote about it. Plain and simple, if there is one app I want you to keep in mind it’s this one.

Mint is a free personal finance application that can help you compare your bank accounts, credit cards, CDs, brokerage and 401(k) to the best products out there. It offers a visual representation of your finances and is very easy to set up. Use it to manage your budget, get credit card advice and understand investing.

Here’s a great video showcasing an overview of Mint’s features:

For some helpful tips on how to use Mint, check out Bakari’s article on How To Use Mint To Manage Your Budget & Spendings Online.

Thrive

Thrive (directory app) is also a great application if you’re looking for a simple way to keep track of your spending. With Thrive, you get an overall Financial Health score, which is one number that shows you how financially fit you are. It also shows you scores in other areas and offers you advice on how to make improvements.

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Thrive breaks down your spending for you and shows you where you can save. Compare your current budget to last month’s, as well as view a six month average and target budgets to follow.

Texthog

Looking for an even simpler way to track expenses? Texthog (directory app) lets you easily store, organize and access your receipts, expense reports and more via text message, the web, your email, iPhone and even Twitter.

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A Texthog free account gives one user the ability to track expenses, view unlimited reports and get budget/bill reminders. Take a photo of your receipts and utilize tags and categories to keep track of everything.

To check out Texthog on your iPhone, you can find the application on iTunes.

Venmo

Speaking of text messages, have you heard of Venmo? Venmo (directory app) is a nice little app that lets you pay and charge friends with your phone. Send and receive secure payments by linking your card to your account. This allows you to settle small loans you give/get by eliminating paper transactions for small amounts of money.

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To use Venmo, all you do is create an account. You can then send and receive money to other accounts simply by using text commands in SMS. Accept a “trust” request from your friends and make transactions without having to authorize them by texting a 3 digit code.

This is a pretty solid application that I have been using a lot lately with my friends/coworkers. It’s great for when a bunch of you are out to lunch and not everyone has cash on them. “I’ll just put it on my card and Venmo you all afterwards.”

Owe Me Cash

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Owe Me Cash is a nice app I found recently that is also very easy to use. If someone owes you money, you just sign into Owe Me Cash with your Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or regular account and tell the app about the debt. The app will send automatic reminders to those that owe you money by phone, text and email, so you can get paid!

This app is more fun than serious, but it doubles as an easy way to keep track of who owes you what. Let the app bug your friends to pay you so you don’t have to do it yourself – it’s a win-win.

Conclusion

With these applications, your finances will never look better. Say goodbye to paper money and change.

What do you think of these money-managing applications? Will you be using any of them?

Image Credit: marema


Hapa is fast becoming the norm, the days of backlash are long over, at least in Cali, and certainly in the LBC where i am from. Though from our embarrassment of a museum, LBMofA, you would never know. The Paramount/Artesia/Long Beach area is known as the most integrated in the country, and swirl kids like mine and many others are very common from many different ethnic backgrounds and cultures. Mine is white and black, he dates a blonde Columbian. My adopted is black with an Irish grandpa and mexican/white girlfriend in medical school, though you would never know except by his last name. Know kids who are Samoan/black, Philipino/Mexican. Black/Mexican, Mexican/PuertoRican, Cambodian/Indian, white and everyone else, Philipino/white like my cousins daughter. And of course we have that mutt Obama guy.



Sports have done the most to integrate our country, from Korean/Black like a SuperBowl MVP, to more mixed kids at our Poly HS, the most NFL players of any in history at going on 60, like Marcedes Lewis at Jacksonville Jaguars little brother and sister when mom married a white guy, she used to babysit for me. Landry Fields, Pac Ten scholar athlete of the year at Stanford now a starter for the Knicks grew up with us and also a swirl like my boy. Lots of swirl kids like Jason Kidd, Tony Parker, Jordan Farmar, the Lopex twins are never given a second glance.



The arts are way behind in this, as few have kids from being too selfish , and not very open to true world culture anyway, it is completely white again. With a few token Asian girls thrown in. only the rich and foolish can afford the useless art degrees, other ethnicities have better sense. Also, if not for the number of head NFL coaches in rustbelt cities a few years ago, Obama never would ahve won. It took white racists to see hardworking, responsible, intelligent black men to get over their prejudices. Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and more have help slowly open the land to diversity, far more than the arts.



Its time to get back to early modernism, where all cultures had something to add, instead of the academic white bread nutritionless lily whiteness of today. Where did it go wrong? The Academies were resurrected from their deserved grave, time to storm the Bastilles of art, and free it for us all.



art collegia delenda est



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