Automate Your Budgeting

Speaking of advancements in saving money, automated budgeting is at the top of the list. It wasn’t that long ago that people had to track their spending via balancing their checkbook. This manual process was arduous, time-consuming, and flat-out annoying.

Those days are gone. Free online budget apps like Mint.com make it incredibly easy to set up a monthly budget, and then let the app do the work.

You do this by allowing an app like Mint to see the purchases you make across your credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts. Mint automatically categorizes each expenditure into the proper category, and then allows you to set budgets for each individual category.

Complete with alerts, customizations, and savings tools, apps like Mint make it easy to quickly track your finances. If you’re like me, you’ll start finding areas you are spending money that you didn’t even know about. Old subscriptions, recurring payments – you can start to chip away at these charges now that you know about them.