Favorite Things

I’ve been using Mint to track my spending and net worth for eight years. It provides a consolidated snapshot of your entire money life, including balances for checking/savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and investment accounts. The historical information that Mint maintains helps to measure progress and identify areas you can improve with your spending. It isn’t perfect, but its strength lies in the ability to customize spending categories. This helps to ensure your spending (and historical data) is tracked in a way that makes sense to you.

Website: Mint

Personal Capital offers many of the same features as Mint, plus a bunch of awesome tools in addition. Everything is wrapped up into a beautifully sleek and modern interface. The tools Personal Capital offers include a robust retirement planning tool, which allows you to project if you are on track and compare varied scenarios. It also offers a tool to analyze the fees you are paying to invest, as well as a tool to analyze your portfolio. I don’t use Personal Capital to track spending, because it isn’t as customizable as Mint (but it’s getting better). However, the other tools make this a no-brainer keep around.

Website: Personal Capital

Credit Sesame is a service that provides the following:

• Free monthly credit score updates.
• Free monitoring and alerts on your credit report, including the ability to receive automated notifications for important credit monitoring events.
• Free identity theft protection – including $50,000 in identity theft insurance.

With all the recent high-profile instances of personal data hacks and security breaches, it is now more important than ever to stay on top of your credit report. Credit Sesame offers a no-brainer, free way to do that.

Website: Credit Sesame