Understand your spending is necessary when it comes to money saving. Most often, you will hear this from someone who has trouble figuring out their spending: “I don’t understand where all my money goes.” We definitely don’t want to be that person because lack of financial knowledge may lead to making poor financial choices. In today blog, I want to show you a couple of free tools that I use to track my expenses.
Mint
Mint is actually the first smartphone app that I used to track my money. I enjoy it because it is straightforward to use. All you have to do is to sync up your bank and credit card accounts. From there, the app will automatically sort through all the transactions and give you a fair idea about your income and expenses. The app has 4 significant taps: Overview, Alert, Offers, and Setting. Under Overview, I can see all my recent transactions, credit card bills, and so much more. The best feature is the breaking down of spending by a pie chart and column charts.
It also alerts me when I spend too much money on a particular category such as foods, clothing, entertainment…
The app is convenient because it is available on both phone and computer platforms.
The only thing that I have trouble with is the categorization of my transaction. To use this app effectively, you should follow these two tips:
- Make sure you categorize your purchases, so you are not confused when looking at your total spending. For example, recently Adobe Premier Pro charged me $41 for canceling their annual subscription too early. Mint will automatically categorize this transaction as “Furnishing” and put it under “Home” category. This transaction should not go under “Home” because I did not use Adobe to fix or add anything to my house.
- Customize your budget for the category that means that most to you. For example, I set my monthly budget for Gas and Fuel at around $250. If I go over that budget, I will receive an alert email from Mint.
Related: 10 WAYS TO SPEND MONEY WISELY
Clarity Money
Clarity Money (CM) is the app I recently downloaded because I want to see how it is different from Mint. I don’t see much difference between these 2 apps. They function the same way which requires syncing up your bank accounts. They have a slightly different setup. For example, CM tells me how much I spent within the last few days and compared it with my previous spending to see if that is normal for me. I like this feature because I can see this data immediately once opening this app. It makes me more aware of my spending. CM also tells me my income so far for the month when how many days until my next paycheck.
Takeaway points:
These tools are meant only to assist you with your spending. If you ignore the information provided by the apps and just open it once a month, you will not get any benefits from it. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
