Mint: Personal Finance and Responsibility

I'm always preaching Financial Literacy. The economy is in dire straits and everyone needs to "tighten their belts" and save money. We have been a consumer society for so long especially the African American community. We continue to buy above our means and spend money on frivolous items. Saving money builds wealth.

So last week my boy put me on to a new website: Mint

The first thing you see when you log onto Mint.com is a dashboard filled with useful information. You can see your account balances and your current net worth. You can see your total available cash and the current month’s net income. You can see alerts about account balances, transactions, interest rates, and payment due dates. You can see recent changes to your investment accounts. And of course, you can see if you're on, under, or over budget.

Other great features:

- Tag your transactions to group them and find related purchases

- When looking at transactions, it takes one click to see all transactions with that description or in that category

- Bulk edit transactions

- Create rules to automatically categorize transactions

- Create rules for alerts to your email and mobile phone

So make a budget and put more money aside for savings. It's going to be a lot more rainy days before there are sunny days in the future.