While there are plenty of online budgeting tools available, the biggest and probably the best would be Mint.com.
Mint.com is a free personal finance tool that helps you manage your checking and savings accounts, along with investments, credit card accounts and student loans. The one prerequisite is that you need to be signed up for online banking with your bank to use Mint.com.
Signing up is easy:
1. Provide your e-mail address
2. Zip code
3. Create a password
4. Agree to the terms of service
5. Enter your banks name or url
6. Login to your online banking account using Mint.com’s secure login.
7. Mint.com will pull up your accounts with that bank and banking history.
8. If you have more banks you can repeat steps 5 thru 6
Once you have entered in all of your banking information you can update your profile or go to your overview page. This is where you will see all of the accounts you entered along with your net totals for each institution. The best feature of this site is that it tracks your spending habits and creates a budget for you based upon the average deposits made to the account the average amount spent on categories like shopping, dining out, groceries, gas, etc.
Based upon your transaction history Mint.com breaks down a budget for how much to spend in each category. The grey area of this site is for checks written. You will need to manually enter in the check information such as what the check was for and categorize it. If you want to increase or decrease your budget amounts for certain categories you can always edit them.
So if making a budget isn’t your thing, let Mint.com do the work for you.
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Another one you may want to check out is http://www.BudgetSimple.com , it is also free, but unlike Mint doesn’t require so much personal information.
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