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I’m Loving Mint.com

February 9, 2011 by Mayde | Leave a comment

Mint.com is a personal finance website that allows you to pull in all of your banking data and view it in a new and eye-opening way.

I’ve known about Mint since it won the TechCrunch40 Best Presenting Company prize in 2007, and since then, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. Sure, there’s been some skepticism about how safe a site like this could actually be, but I trust Intuit and I trust lots of other people who trust Mint, so I figured I’d give it a try.

As part of my new year’s resolution to save money, I’ve been super vigilant about how I spend every nickle and dime. I’ve even come up with a game plan that will allow me to pay off my student loans and save up enough money for a car by the end of the summer. But in order to pull this off, I knew I needed some help in monitoring my spending. Enter Mint.

When you first sign up, you enter your bank account information, along with any credit cards, loans and investments you might have. Using this information, Mint calculates your personal worth, and presents you with advice on how to get the most out of your money. While I haven’t actually followed through on any of Mint’s advice yet, I do take advantage of their transaction tracking tools. You can categorize every transaction you make, and then see your spending trends displayed using neat little pie charts:

You can also set up budgets for yourself and savings goals you’d like to reach. For example, here’s a quick little sample budget I threw together for this post:

Frankly, I can’t say enough good things about Mint. It’s definitely helping me reach my goals, and I think it could be useful for you. I was in no way compensated for reviewing this site, I just think it’s neat. Since I’ve been using it a lot lately, I figured I’d write up a little blurb about it to see if anyone else is enjoying it as much as I am.

So, tell me: Have you ever heard of Mint.com? Would you trust a site like this to manage all of your financial data? If you don’t use Mint, what do you use to monitor your spending? Let me know by leaving a comment.

Cutting Our Cable

January 17, 2011 by Mayde | 1 comment

Dan and I made a big decision this week that we hope will simplify our life and save us a ton of money.

We canceled our cable service and our home phone line.

I know this seems like a drastic decision, and you may be asking, “Why, oh why would you do such a thing?” This is why:

Ever since our Triple Play promotional discount expired this past summer, we’ve been paying over $150/month for TV, internet and phone. This seemed a little outrageous to us, so we decided to make some cutbacks.

Since we almost never use our home phone, that was an obvious thing to cut out of our budget. Deciding to cut our television service took a bit more thought and a lot of number crunching. We ultimately made our decision based on two main points:

  1. Everything we watch on TV is also available online, on Netflix and/or through Hulu Plus.
  2. We’re hoping that not being able to have mindless TV on when we’re home will force us to be more selective about what we watch and what we do with our time.

To elaborate on the first point, some of our favorite shows include House, Law and Order SVU, Glee, Raising Hope, Hoarders and Intervention, all of which are available through either Netflix or Hulu. Plus, with these paid accounts, we can finally watch some of the other shows we’ve been meaning to watch, such as 24, Community, Arrested Development and Dexter. The wide selection of TV shows and movies available through these services make it well worth the small monthly price. Let’s do the math:

TV Service from Optimum = $93.78/month

Home Phone Service from Optimum = $19.95/month

Netflix ($9.99/month) + Hulu Plus ($7.99/month) = $17.98/month

We Save = $95.75/month

We’ve been living without TV for three days so far, and we haven’t missed it. We’ve been taking advantage of our Hulu and Netflix accounts, watching a lot of online videos, and we’ve even found a PS3 application that will let us rent new movies on demand. The only hard part now is figuring out how we’re going to return our cable box to Optimum.

What do you think about our decision to cancel our cable service? Do you think we’re crazy, or is the huge savings worth it? Have you ever considered canceling your television service in favor of services like Netflix and Hulu? Do you have any TV or movie recommendations for us? Let me know by leaving a comment.