Mint.com Financial Tool

Mint Personal Financial Tool

Many of you have probably never heard of MINT.com, this simple to use software program is a great web based financial tool that is totally free to the user and it only takes minuets to add your personal accounts to the program.

This program is mostly about helping you budget and track your expenses. Every time you use one of your accounts the software program will sync your transactions and then send them to a category that you and the system setup. This will help you find out where your money is going from week to week, it is an eye opener to see what your spending habits are. This will assist you with your budgets and make sure your spending habits are managed.

Since this web based program is free one thing that you cannot control on the site is the advertising. Mint does target advertising, so some of the ads on the site may be beneficial to you.

A lot of people have asked me about the security of the site especially today with all the online hacking that is taking place. Mint.com uses a bank-grade security software. According to the NY Times article all passwords and usernames are protected with the same level of security as a financial institution.

One of the newest features of Mint.com has recently rolled out is a free credit score tracking option. With just a click of the mouse you can view your credit score, payment history, age of your credit accounts, and your spending habits.

I truly believe this to be another great free tool for people needing help with their credit and or budgeting.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Credit Karma

I have been using and recommending Credit Karma for years. There are a lot of advantages to using this service to get a good look at your credit. One of the real nice advantage is that Credit Karma is a free service. They have large paid advertisers base that cover the cost of this service. What that means to you is that you will never have to give Credit Karma a credit card number to use this service. Some of the other credit services offer free credit information but you have to supply them with a credit card, some of these services only give you thirty days of free service and then they charge you a fee. With Credit Karma you do not have to worry about ever getting charged for the service they provide.

Here are a few of the services that Credit Karma offers you:

Credit Karma gives you a report card of credit. This is an analysis of your open credit card utilization, average age of open credit lines, hard credit inquiries, total debt, and of course the big debt to income ration.  This report is awesome because it shows you a grade of A through F for each area. If you use this information correctly you can fix these areas that you are scoring a C or worse to help improve your overall credit score.

You also receive for free is a snapshot of your credit score from TransUnion which can be updated as much as you like. Credit Karma keeps track of your score over a period of time and lets you know how you are coming along hopefully fixing any credit issues. The snapshot is a view of how lenders are viewing your credit as compared to the national scores.

A great tool that Credit Karma offers is a credit simulator. This tool gives you fourteen different simulations that you can run to see how they will affect your personal credit. One example I tried was, how raising my credit limits affected my overall score. The fourteen options are broken down into three categories: credit limit, payments, and records.

Other feature that Credit Karma offers are news articles dealing with finances, financial tools, financial calculators and forums and feeds pertaining to finances.

The only disadvantage of Credit Karma is that they don't give you a true "FICO Score". They do offer a real close to true score which is very helpful. This is the only thing I found to be a little disadvantage, but I can live with it since they do offer so many other beneficial tools to help a person with there credit issues.