Learning to Budget and Control Your Personal Finances with Mint.com

By energy_linguist, May 17, 2010, Personal Finance

Granted, there is no surefire way that an online money management/personal finance platform can help you save money both short and long term, but it can teach you how to save money as well as provide promotions and offers (as Mint.com does) to help you shave costs in areas like high-interest debt.

I’m actually a Mint.com user as we speak, and I can attest to the ease of use and benefits it provides:

Sync your personal banking, credit card, car loans and other accounts so that all transactions can be tracked automatically.
Categorize transactions automatically.
Set monthly spending budgets and track progress instantly.

Mint.com also uses your transaction patterns to make suggestions for ways to cut costs, though these often involve offers from partner providers (banks, credit card companies, etc). I will say that being able to track all of my expenses and setting a budget for bills, gas, groceries, fun money and so on, allows me to monitor regular spending.