For the past 4 hours I've been going through my bank statements from 2008-2009, as well as going through my far from organized drawer of receipts. My room is a mess and I feel like pulling my hair out, and I have a lot of it to pull (see the photo of my room to the right).

Earlier this year I had signed up for Mint.com. It's a free personal finance website and budget planner. It's super easy to use. You sign up for an account and enter in your bank accounts. Once it has this information it begins to monitor your spending, and categorizing your transactions. For example, if you go to dinner and pay on your card, it will automatically see the purchase and categorize it as food. Every once and a while it marks something wrong, but once you correct it once it will never fail again.

When you login to your account at the end of the day you're presented with graphs of all of your spending. Everything is categorized. Everything of simple. None of the receipt mess.

You can even setup weekly budgets for yourself. For example, $400.00 for food. If you start approaching your weekly budget for food, you will receive a text message and email alerting you (yes, you can change what types of notifications you receive).

In March of this year I got a new debit card and forgot to update it on Mint. Now I'm kicking myself in the ass, as I go through dirty, crumpled, faded receipts, and categorize them into an Excel spreadsheet. Death. Truly, death.

Mint.com has various other services available, student loan organization, debt help, budgeting tools, and more. I've personally only used the budgeting tools and account history, but I can imagine that all of the services are just as easy to use as the one's I've used.

Anyways, the lesson has been learned. Starting tonight I will be using Mint for all of my accounts.

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