Finance Tools

You can download the free budgeting form here…

Someone asked me to share my favorite free household or personal budgeting spreadsheets… Each one of these budgeting templates are free… If you use OpenOffice (basically a free version of Microsoft Office)…

Getting out of debt part 3 -Create a balance sheet…Your Net Worth changes how you think about buying decisions:The second reason I prefer to use my Net Worth to track my progress is because I have found it helps change how I think about my buying decisions.

Being impacted by my uncle’s premature death and wanting to do everything I can do to help my wife, I decided to create a system for keeping things organized. It has been a work in progress over the last few years, but has evolved into a very helpful tool. Simply put, it is a single file or location for all your financial account details. I call it a FLOP (Financial Life on One Page). FLOP sounds a little cooler than FLOOP, but not much

SmartyPig is basically an online savings account that allows your friends and family to contribute to your savings goals. They also provide you with additional incentive boosts from top retailers who sell the items you are saving for. And surprisingly, they are currently boasting a 4.30% (APY) - which is a heck of a lot more than ING Direct is paying or most other online banks.

YNAB!! If you are interested in getting a free copy of YNAB budgeting software, then keep reading for instructions.

Want to know how to budget? Well, ING Direct is my favorite budget tool. Here are the steps how I budget with ING Direct. You could probably use this same technique at other banks, but I will show you why it is more beneficial at ING Direct.

One of the newest ones to their lineup is a 411 service. They use a voice recognition program similar to Jott.com to direct the calls. So you don’t actually talk to a person when you call, but if you get connected to the business that you need - who cares? I think most cell phone companies charge at least a buck or two for this service. For the price, I think Google’s 411 is worth a try.

I like it because I often get ideas while I am driving and have no SAFE means of getting them down on paper (believe me, writing while driving is far more dangerous than talking on your cell phone). This process is very simple if you put the number in your one-touch speed dial on your phone.

What is the catch? For most people there isn’t one. They give you up to 10 free stock trades a day or 40 per month. Anything over that is $3.50 per trade (which is still a steal). I found out that they make the majority of their revenue from options trading and interest on uninvested balances.

Click here to download my personal balance sheet (Excel). The simple personal finance definition of this would be: Assets - Liabilities = Net Worth | It probably wouldn’t take you more than an hour to get it set up in an excel spreadsheet, and even less to update it every year.

Bill Pay[/tag] is a service offered by just about every bank or credit union under the sun. It does just what the name implies; it allows you to pay your bills via your bank online.
Your bank foots the bill for the stamps and sends your payment from your checking account to whatever address you specify.

This is a quick mental trick you can use to get valuable information on your investments.
Divide 72 by the percentage rate of any investment that you have and it will (approximately) give you the number of years until the investment doubles.