Spending Habits

If you ever tried Quicken, you'll know that while the concept sounds great, it's a real pain to set up properly. I once spent hours trying to get all my accounts configured. A few things changed in my financial life and I simply gave up trying to keep Quicken in tune.

Check out Mint.com. It offers the basic benefits of Quicken without the hassle of setup time. Enter all your bank and credit card accounts and Mint will sort through all your transactions and categorize them accordingly. Categories are limited but sufficient, and it doesn't appear to support investment accounts. Otherwise it's pretty useful. Vanguard does a fine job of showing my investment allocation but my banking sites are pretty worthless when it comes to analyzing anything (except finding an excuse to charge an outrageous fee).

The site analyzes your spending and even provides recommendations to save money (ads in disguise).

Nothing says you shouldn't have bought that car like a huge slice of the monthly pie chart...