I wasn’t completely disorganized in my financial life, but I knew we could do better. This is an area where I’m always challenged.
Several years back, a friend had recommended Mint. Setup was easy and linking my accounts worked pretty well. This gave us a general view of things and I set up a budget and some goals for paying off debts. It was nice for a while, but I never really felt like it made an impact on our behavior. There wasn’t a clearly visible trend-line for me to track and the budget became more of a suggestion than a hard rule. Oops, we went over on groceries again!
Last Fall, I decided to try out Personal Capital. Again, setup was easy and most of the accounts worked*. This had exactly what I wanted. Net Worth and Cash Flow graphs are right there on the home screen. I now had a better graphical representation of how things are changing over time. This suits the way my brain works.
In my next post I want to talk about learning to understand cash flow and how i’m adding that to my view of our financial health.
Cheers,
-cb3
*There is an issue with Associated Credit Union 2-factor that makes me re-authenticate every time but PC is aware of the problem and stated that it will take a code update on their part to fix