For those of you who know me, you might remember that I was using the beta of TurboTax ExpensePro to have it organize and analyze how Skunkie ‘n I spend our money. It was a little buggy and not super convenient, but I was still disappointed when they decided to dump the project. The other day I stumbled upon a couple of free web apps that do the same thing…
The first one I tried was Wesabe. I liked the idea, but I wanted something that would automatically sync with all of my financial accounts without me having to remember. While looking for a way to automate the syncing process with Wesabe, I discovered an even more powerful site called Mint.com. Mint was so easy to set up it was almost funny. After about 2 clicks I entered my username/password for my bank and it found all 3 of my accounts, it synced, that was it. I added my credit card accounts and looked around the site. It’s sort of like Google Analytics for financial information. It showed me where I was spending my money, compared it with national/local averages, showed me where I could save some money by switching companies, let me set budgets and have it email/SMS my phone if I went over… For the first time ever I actually feel like I can understand my entire financial situation without any guesswork, signing into 5 different sites or even worse, calculations. If for some reason I decide not to use Mint, I can delete my entire account with a couple of clicks and *poof* I’m gone.
One thing to note was that a small percentage of purchases we make were un-categorized. I figured that I should categorize them so Mint could properly keep track of my budget and spending… About 5-10 minutes later I had setup all the rules needed to categorize everything I buy. I’m assuming that the default categories were figured out from other users categorizing the same stores, so I may have inadvertently contributed my categorizing skills. As a side note, we apparently spend more than the average person on electronics, and less on most everything else… Big surprise :)
I can think of so many friends and family that would greatly benefit from using this free service that I figured it would be easier to post here then tell each of them. Maybe I’m just the last person to find Mint because they already track around $17billion dollars, but hopefully someone will find this post useful and go try it out. *nudge*
Comments System Having Issues
The past few days have been rather hectic. Our internet was completely down all day yesterday making it impossible to answer bug reports in the tracker on Punk Labs and of course noticing any issues that might occur with the sites in general. Looks like Atomac’s comment system is having some trouble right now. When commenting some people (PolyVector and myself are experiencing this as well) will be directed to a blank white page. The comment will end up not being submitted. I have narrowed it down to an issue with our current template, which we had updated a few ays ago to take care of some issues. I remember the comment system working, in fact a comment was just left on an older article today. We will try and fix this problem as soon as possible. If you end up getting the white page of death hang tight, I’ll update this as soon as the problem is resolved.
Update: PolyVector helped me fix the problem. This one was rather tricky. it seems the template author was using a single variable for two different purposes ($id) and it was causing comments to be posted to non-existing articles which failed without an error (white page of death). I have contacted the author with the issue and how to fix it. If anyone happens to experience any issues with the comments system still, please contact me.