Who doesn’t love free stuff? This week, I’m giving you a list of free financial tools, tips, calculators, and even an ebook to help you get control of your money without spending anything to do it. Enjoy.
Mint
Mint downloads your financial transactions from your bank and credit card, and gives you awesome graphs and budgets based on your spending. It can also track the balance on your student loans, so that you know what you owe! I’m addicted to their pretty, pretty graphs. [As you’ll see from the Mint link, they’re giving away $2,000 to the millionth person to sign up for Mint. If you’ve been putting off getting an account, now may be the time to do so!]
Wesabe
Similar to Mint, but with a more community aspect to it. Wesabe has tools to compare your spending to other peoples’ (anonymously) and to share and read tips from others. Some people complain that the community on Wesabe isn’t great for college students and twenty-somethings, but is more geared toward thirty-somethings with kids. But the only way to fix that is to get more college students on the site, right?
Yoodlee
If you’re looking for a bare-bones version of Mint or Wesabe, Yoodlee is literally that. It’s the engine that those sites, and others, use to download and graph your transactions. Some banks offer Yoodlee services to their online users, like Bank of America, which called it “MyPortfolio.”
Quicken Online
Always known for its robust approach to finances, Quicken now offers a free online service. This, too, will download your transactions straight from your bank and credit cards, and will analyze it and allow you to use several Quicken tools for budgeting and money management. Quicken products are known for being very dense, so this might be overwhelming for some people. But it’s great if you’re looking for more control out of your online money management tool.
Pearbudget spreadsheet
Don’t want to upload your banking information to an online service? Or maybe you want something small, but powerful, that you can carry around on a flash drive. I dig it, and I think PearBudget’s spreadsheet might be the thing for you. It’s a nifty little budgeting device that’s completely free to download and use. It runs in Excel, OpenOffice, or even on Google Docs! Paid Twice has a nice guide to PearBudget spreadsheet hacks, so that you can get even more out of this powerful little tool.
NetworthIQ
This is where I get the nice graphs that track my net worth in the sidebar here on my site, and for my monthly net worth updates. Although you have to enter the information in manually, the sites above can help to make that easy (my friend Sam uses the information he gets from Mint to fill in his NetworthIQ every month). Tracking your net worth gives you “big picture” view of your finances that you might be missing if you just look at the day-to-day stuff.
FinAid’s Calculators
This site has calculators for so many things relating to financial aid and money, you’ll keep coming back to them for everything! Try their Student Budget Calculator, their Student Loan Advisor for undergraduate students, their Loan Repayment Calculator (my favorite!) and their Compound Interest Calculator. They even have a Peer-to-Peer Lender calculator, to help you with services like Lending Club.
Credit Karma and AnnualCreditReport.com
These two services are the keys to getting your free credit score and your free credit report.
The Hartford Playbook for Life
This free ebook is a money guide for college students and recent graduates, with a basketball/sports theme. If you’re not a sports fan, don’t let that hold you back: I’m not either, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I definitely recommend downloading this one!
The College Money Network
You may have noticed that as far as free financial services go, blogs such as the one you’re reading right now are enormously helpful. Poorer Than You is a member of the College Money Network, where you can find even more financial tips and tools that are relevant to your life as a student. You can visit the network homepage, or you can always find links to the other member sites in the sidebar here on Poorer Than You.
Do you use a free financial service or tool that I missed? Also, next week, this series will cover free stuff online that’s not related to personal finance, but can still save you money. If you’ve got a favorite free service, leave a comment!
I love Mint & Credit Karma. Two great selections to put on this list.
I messed around with Pear budget but in the end… Mint won hands down for me!
@MLR: Different strokes for different folks, right? I don’t use Mint that much anymore, since I get most of what I need out of BoA’s MyPortfolio. My main use for an aggregator like that is to make sure there’s no fraudulent activity on any of my many accounts. But some people swear by Mint, and I understand that. It’s pretty powerful!
Hi Stephanie,
This is Chelsea from Quicken Online. Thanks so much for mentioning Quicken Online in your post about helpful finance stuff.
If you don’t mind, I’d like to follow-up on how easy Quicken Online is to use. It’s geared toward a totally different audience than Quicken desktop (basic personal finance instead of the more advanced investing and PF).
Happy to give you a demo or more information. Thanks again for mentioning Quicken Online.
– Chelsea
I’ve used Mint since they came out. But since I don’t do a budget or anything like that I just use it to keep tabs on my finances.
The best feature was the free iPhone app mint launched. I use it on the go and it’s great! Never tried the other programs though.
I love mint.com and networthIQ!! I check mint all the time and find it a lot easier than loging into each individual account like I used to do. On networthIQ I like to update it every so often and see where i’m standing finanacial versus previous months. Have I saived more this month than i did last month? 2 months ago? I think both are just nice ways to keep tabs on transactions and finanaces without having to create and maintain your own spreadsheets.
I wish all these tools were available when I was a student. Back then I used a simple spreadsheet – it worked well for me at the time. ๐
I love reading these articles because they’re short but infomritave.
A nice collection of useful sites, Stephanie. I’ve been using Mint for a while now, and it’s been helpful to give me a broader view of my finances. The Net Worth tracker looks helpful, and putting a net worth graph on my site could be interesting. Thanks for sharing.
An excellent informative resource for students
I use Mint and have for a while. I have a love/hate relationship with it. Mint itself is wonderful, but dealing with my spending is where the hate comes in….