A quick little finiancial checklist to start you off right. This was first shared by Scott Adams and I though I should add it here. This is from Scott Adam’s book “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels.” He goes on to state that annuities are a bad idea. Whole life insurance is also a bad idea. Investing in individual stocks is a bad idea. Investing in managed mutual funds instead of an index fund is bad. The list goes on but that is the idea. Tell me what you think.

1. Make a will if you haven’t already done so.
2. Cut up those credit cards as they are the things of evil.
3. Seek and get Term Life Insurance if you haven’t already done so.
4. Fund your 401K to the maximum amount.
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum amount.
6. Buy a house if you wish to own one and only if you can afford it.
7. Always stash away at least six months worth of expenses expenses in a money-market account.
8. Take all other money and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund and do not touch until ready to retire. I like to use Sharebuilder to do this.

Popularity: 10% [?]

I was very fortunate to always get what I wanted when I was growing up. All I had to do was say I wanted something and sure enough I would get it. That made me into an impulsive buyer when I became an adult. I never looked for sales and therefore money just trickled out of my savings account.

I am not going to talk about looking for coupons or impulsive buying. When you work so hard to save money into a savings account you want to keep it there.

Save Money and Keep your Saved Dollars

1. Create a personal budget – very important first step. The best way to save money is to trim what doesn’t need to be spent.
   • Depending on your income and expenses you will know a reasonable number to set aside solely for savings. Declaring a realistic figure like $25-$50 per week or maybe even bi-weekly.The point is something is always better then nothing so don’t get discouraged if it seems like a small amount.
2. The 3 Bank Account Difference – the 3 accounts all serve a distinctive purpose.
   • Spending Account – this account can be a checking or savings account. This account will receive paychecks and will take the role of dealing with daily expenses. This one is okay to have an ATM card in order to withdraw money for day to day activities.
   • Rainy-day/Emergency Fund Account – this will be your emergency blanket. This will cover any unforeseen emergencies. Job loss, car repairs, household repairs, house tax increases and so on.This account should have no ATM card and should be emergency use only.
   • Savings Account – this account also should not have and ATM card and you will not transfer out money from this account for day to day purposes or things like groceries and so on.I use currently use Paypal’s money market account for this and I also use Sharebuilder money market account.
3. Fill up Emergency Funds Account – this account should be filled up before the savings account.As a rule of thumb try to save enough to cover all of your expenses for at least the next 6 months or do like me and save enough for 10 months
4. Save Money Now – when you have a nice emergency fund setup and ready only then would you start saving.Try to set an automatic transfer that occurs every two weeks or every month. Automatic transfers makes sure that you do it and you never have to worry about remembering.I picked up this from David Bach and his Automatic Millionaire book.

No worries about tracking where your money goes and wondering if you put money in.

That’s it to automatic savings and novice budgeting.

Popularity: 39% [?]

The buzz is that there is a contender to Quicken and it is web based and free. You can check your finances anywhere and at anytime you wish. It has a nice look and feel with speed from the Ajax backend that it was built on. I am no super finance guru but I will give the review that I feel best with for average to intermediate users.

Advantages

• Fast.
• Free.
• A rival to Quicken even in its beta stage.
• Easy setup.
• Accessible anywhere.
• Beautiful Ajax design.
• Tons of graphs and charts.
• Easy way to see trends.
• Nice feature named “Ways to Save.”

Truly one of the best rivals to Quicken and it is free to use with no installs to worry about. It is built on a web technology that allows it to load various parts of the web page in an auto update way. I just added my user name and password for my various accounts and waited a short minute or less for account history to be updated; then I was ready to rock. They added a plethora of charts and graphs to show spending habits in a glance. You can even check spending habits as easy as just viewing your personalized trend reports page. Mint.com truly tries to make personal finance as easy as checking your email. A good feature that I really like is the “Ways to Save” money section. I love it because what it proposes to do is automatically check different banks and get you the best rates that it can find all automatically. I feature still has some bugs but it shows a lot of promise.

Disadvantages

• Didn’t know my credit card info like interest rate and total rewards.
• Misclassified a Countrywide Mortgage Payment as an Electronic Boutique Purchase.
• Still in Beta.
• Suggestions to save money section named “Ways to Save” needs work.

With all good things there are the disadvantages or the minor short comings. I plugged in my information for one of my credit cards and up to now it doesn’t know the exact interest rate or APR. Mint.com also tries to categorize all info automatically but still false short in this aspect as well. One of my mortgage payments was classified as a Electronic Boutique purchase but was then replaced by transfer. The suggestions to save money is still a major point but however still needs some work as well. I don’t want to be too mean because the web application is still in beta.

Conclusions

All I can say is try it out and see what you can get from it. It’s free and over round pretty good. Just remember that it is in beta still so don’t go by everything that it has to say without first thinking it thoroughly through. That goes especially for the ways to save money section.

Popularity: 76% [?]