Personal Finances

Ever since I got out of high school there has been one thing that I've wished I had: personal finance education. About half way through my JR year of college I realized that I have no idea how to manage my own money. Aside from one survey course in economics, all of my education related to money has come from AP news articles and wikipedia. Given that the bulk of our lives are spent trying to produce money, maintain it, and grow it, wouldn't you think that we should know more about how we do that?

Over the past several months I've taken some simple steps to get a better handle on my finances and spending. In 2006, I switched entirely over to Bank of America, mainly because at the time I was going to Texas for an internship and Cape Cod 5 just doesn't seem to have ATMs there yet (I hear in the next couple months, or maybe it was eons..). Well, BoA turned out to be a good decision, I've got free checking, 0%apr on my credit card over a year later (I'm not gonna ask and jinx it), and free online bill pay. Perhaps the most useful tool I've gotten out of it is the online banking. Sure, I used it with CC5 in the past, but BoA has a much more evolved set of tools that allow you to better see your transactions and analyze your financial situation much more readily. If you're thinking about switching to a nationwide bank, I'd recomment them.

Something else I've done to help educate myself on personal finance is to beging reading several finance blogs. Some of my favorites of these include: The Simple Dollar, Lazyman and Money, Free from Broke, and The Tao of Making Money. These all vary in their interests and there are plent of other sources out there, but these are some pretty good general interest personal finance blogs that I've found some helpful articles on. One great thing I got from these is the 100% free credit report site CreditKarma.com. Unlike Freecreditreport.com, it's actually free and pretty helpful. They make their money through suggestions for other services, but if you just ignore that its a pretty great site.

Today I started using Mint.com which has turned out to be pretty fantastic. If you're looking for a utility to see your entire cashflow, it categorizes all expenditures and graphs it, and gives you budgeting tools. So far I think it's pretty fantastic. Once I get into online stock trading (whenever that is) it should be that much more useful for keeping track of my portfolio. It's completely safe and worth checking out.