Megan’s Dance Recital 2010
Megan had her dance recital and had a lot of fun. She said her teacher told her and her friends that there weren’t real pirates backstage. I guess some of the dancers were dressed as pirates?
In her morning practice at the studio, Megan told Angie that she could do the dance with her eyes closed (and she did during the practise), but her teacher told her to open her eyes at the end.
Big Storm 2010
We hit a big storm on the way back from Thanksgiving. When we got home, we had almost 10 inches of snow!!!!
We snapped a picture of the snow on top of our recycle bin. That’s about 10 inches.
It’s a lot to try to get off the driveway; that’s for sure!
Kickin’ it in 2010 – Adventures in Soccer
Autumn enjoyed her soccer games this year. She got right up to kick the ball, and as she puts it, “I run really fast!”
Autumn was one of two girls on her team this year. She was also one of the tallest on her team.
Top 10 Reasons why you should use Mint.com (for Free) to automatically manage your finances.
Do any of these quotes sound familiar?
“Buy low, sell high.”
“Those who understand interest earn it, those who don’t, pay it.”
“Watch what you spend.”
“[Unless kept in check], your expenses will rise to meet your income.”
Sound advice. The last one, is perhaps one of the most important.
Generally, when we think about people who struggle financially, we think of those living out in the sticks without clean water, but the reality is, financial trouble goes up and down the entire income scale. Perhaps you’ve heard of the movie stars in the news that have had to declare bankruptcy. Why? Is it because they weren’t making enough? From our point of view, they make plenty. It’s because they’ve let their expenses exceed (waaaay exceed) their income. They’ve stretched themselves too thin.
We’d like to end up with a movie star income, but not the movie star financial management (or lack thereof). That’s why no matter where our income falls, it’s important to keep what we spend in check.
As a family, we’ve kept track of our finances in a variety of ways from programming to using Excel and entering receipts. Very, very tedious to enter receipts and split expenses when buying multiple things from one store.
It’s been a while now, but we finally switched over to Mint.com, and it has saved our sanity and tons of effort. Mint is a website you can use to track your finances, your expenses, income, and many other things you can choose to track.
Here’s why you might want to consider Mint:
Top 10 Reasons for using Mint.com
1. Mint saves you oodles of time
Keeping track of expenses is important if you want to be the one to manage your money instead of it managing (or mismanaging you). But entering your receipts one by one is a chore beyond most chores.
The great thing about Mint is that it automatically can pull in your credit card/debit card transactions and check transactions into it’s system. You don’t have to be a data entry dude anymore! Since it’s automatic, you are spared the time of trying to keep track of receipts and bills. Your transactions come up already entered for you!
2. Mint makes setting goals easy (easily set, easily achieved maybe?)
The site lets you set goals like vacation goals, college, etc. Want to live on an exotic island someday, well start an exotic island goal and Mint can help you budget for and save away a little each month. Mint helps you track your progress to your goal.
3. Mint makes talking about finances a more pleasant subject
If you don’t know where you stand with your finances, it’s very hard to get to where you want to be. Mint makes it easy to see at a glance how the finances in the family are doing. Was that dress (or gadget) really needed or within the budget? It’s super easy to tell with the tracking categories Mint automatically sets up for you (you can change and modify them as you like). If you’ve set a budget, buying those fun extra items becomes fun because you know it’s within your budget and you’re not sacrificing something else to get it.
That makes talking about finances much better because you can start to focus on the fun things you want to save for and budget for.
Since both you and your spouse (if you have one) can both log in to the site, it becomes much easier for both to see what’s the state of the finances.
4. Mint helps you create a budget, and it’s super easy to do!
The super easy part is that once Mint has had time to collect some transactions, it will automatically create budget amounts for the categories you choose to monitor (you can also set your own defined amounts). The benefit here is that it bases it on your previous spending habits, so you don’t have to guess at what the budget for electricity should be.
The budgets are easy to view in a bar graph that also shows you how much is left in the month to go.
5. Mint helps keep you within your budget
Just viewing your newly created budget can help keep things in check, but Mint will also send you an email if you like that will indicate that you’re over budget in Auto Care for example.
6. Mint is easy, dare I say enjoyable, to use
I’ve used a number of financial programs, Quicken, Microsoft Money, etc. to help manage finances, and I’ve found that Mint has produced the most user friendly site out of any of them. Buttons and options are large and easy to see. The tabs at the top make it easy to view the breakdown of goals, budgets, and transactions.
7. Mint is safe
Mint is owned by Intuit (big name in the industry. They took Microsoft Money to task and won out). So Mint has data encryption, to protect your data.
8. Mint is free
Hey, it’s free to use and one of the best options out there!
9.Mint makes it easy to view your spending habits
The reports are really cool because you can see how much you spent at Costco or Target for the month, year, etc. With just a few clicks, you can see spending by category too. Better information means better decisions. If you’re finding that you’re spending a lot more on Fast Food than you thought, you can take action from that information.
10. Mint is running a contest for a free Apple iPad
Here’s the scoop, Mint will enter me in a contest for an iPad if you sign up through my link below.
Once singed up, you can refer Mint to your friends!
So, click the link below and sign up for Mint.com:
Sign up for Mint for Free
It’s free, I’ve used it and continue to use it every week. It’s easy, and awesome, so give it a try.
Read MoreIn Celebration of Clone Wars Season 3
What can a thousand Legos and a little bit of time get you? An awesome YouTube Video:
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