Mint.com: Free and Great for Students
If I learned anything during my four years in school, semi-obsessive personal finance is definitely among the finalists. If you think about it, you have relatively low income (or none) and constantly are juggling any number of expenses that have to be paid from textbooks to feeding yourself.
Now that I have graduated, the components have changed but the game remains the same. To this end, I thought it might be helpful to explain why Mint.com worked for me and how you can use the service to keep tabs on your personal finances.
Please keep in mind that this is not an advertisement; this is 100% my opinion on Mint. StudentPlatinum.com and I were not compensated in any way for the writing of this blog post.
I first learned about Mint when I was a sophomore in college (about 3 years ago) and quickly became very interested. It is pretty neat in that it brings together all of your different accounts (banking, student loans, credit cards, mortgages etc.) and displays all their information in an extremely easy to understand format.
There are lots of useful graphs and even tracking information that shows you how well (or poorly) you’ve paid back debt over time. The idea is that being informed about your money will go a long way to identifying the problem and helping you stay on top of it.
In addition to what was said before, there are features like automated low-balance warnings, monthly budget meters (automatic; yeah, as in you don’t have to set it) and a tool that shows good credit card/investment products for your situation.
I think what I like most about the service isn’t necessarily the features themselves, but the fact that it gets you engaged about your money. In some ways, the budgets and graphs are like games; they motivate you to perform in such a way that you always beat the previous month whenever possible. Statistics and charts have a way of making us always want to go above and beyond (or save more) than what came before.
So, that’s Mint.com in a nutshell. It doesn’t cost anything, so go ahead and give it a shot when you have some free time. Cheers!
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