Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

Despite how simple the process can be, most of us are terrible at saving and paying bills. Here's a strategy to effectively automate most of your finances to keep you saving and out of late fee trouble.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich.com has put together a system for managing your personal finances that only takes about an hour of your time each week. The video above fully explains the process in detail, but here's the gist. First, you want to set up your bills and other payments so they're all happening on the day you get your first paycheck of the month (the first of the month for most people). Once you have that in place, you want to set up automatic savings plans (Sethi suggests using Ing Direct) with sub-savings accounts that let you organize your savings into specific categories (vacation, wedding, etc.). You'll also want to send a percentage of your paycheck to your 401k, and have all of this happen immediately so that the money you see when you get paid is the money left when everything has already been saved. From there, you automatically pay as many bills as you can with your credit card (and then pay the credit card bill on pay day). For the bills you can't pay with your credit card (like rent, in most cases), you can use your online banking to automatically issue a check. This will leave a little money leftover in your checking account that you can use to budget for guilt-free spending and cash withdrawals.

As someone who's often fallen victim to the faults of automatic payments systems (despite frequently using them), definitely do not forget to stay on top of your bills nonetheless. Make sure you set some time aside at least once a month to do a little maintenance and make sure there are no bugs causing your automated finance system to break down. Sethi isn't suggesting a set-it-and-forget-it automated finance system by any means, but as someone who hates paying bills I know how easy it can be to procrastinate and ignore the task. If you set up a good automated system like this one, you'll be at a point where all you have to do is watch and fix the occasional problem as the most important things are being taken care of for you.

moBudget will help you organize your personal income and outcome. By doing it, moBudget can also help you in identifying budgeting and saving opportunities. Its main screen presents a dashboard with a set of intelligent indicators which will tell you how is your personal finance doing. Forget about grabbing a calculator to get the numbers you need, the dashboard will say it all; it will inform, alert and advice you when needed so you can make the best budgeting and spending decisions. By allowing stepping through months back and forth, allows you to whether see how you did on previous months and how you will be doing in the upcoming months and adjust your budgets to the optimal. Take it with you, stick to its rules and you will see how money won’t cause a you a headache any more.

Key features

Main dashboard with intelligent indicators

Upcoming and overdue payments, incomes, bills

Color-based and snapshot styled budget bar graphs for easy reading

Budget adjusting helper

Actual balance and budget balance adhoc

Accounts and credit cards usage recording

Cash flow bar graphs and out of funds predictions

Easy input for registering expenses, incomes and transfers

Can create future operations and recurrent operations

Multi currency support

Easy month back and forth navigation

more… see it yourself!

eric seiger do

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

personal finance budgeting

Automate Your Finances to Spend Less Time Managing Your Accounts

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