Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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As part of my money management goal in recent months, I heard (the audio version) of the book, All Your Worth recently and it was an eye opener.

The summary of the book, it asks the reader to keep things simple and divide all incoming money into three categories, the Expenses into Must Haves & Wants. The remaining is Savings.

Must Haves are those expenses, you would not stop even if you did not have a job for an year or two, like Basic food, House, Fuel, etc. Rest are all Wants such as TV, Restaurants, etc.
Over long periods, particularly years, keep the above in following percentages:

Must Haves 50%, Wants 30% & Savings 20%

Within a few days of this, we had tracked our expenses and broadly knew more about our expenditure then we ever did.

The book has suggestions on how to bring the Pie back in balance. Beyond that it covers many other areas such as house purchase, etc.

More information:

Two of the book’s chapter are available from the official All your worth website: The Truth about Money and Financial CPR

It’s All Your Money blog has a detailed review of the book: Balanced Money Formula. He has shared a spreadsheet in the review that allows tracking money and follows the balanced money formula from All your worth.
The Simple Dollar blog also has a detailed review of the book: Review: All Your Worth

For you:
Finally, this book might not be the right Personal Finance book for you, depending on your spending habits, earnings, age, savings, etc.

Simple Dollar blog has an article with some suggestions in This Is the Right Personal Finance Book for You!

In the last month or so, I put in some effort on money management.

As part of discovering a way to do expense management and budgeting, I tried multiple software and online web sites for US residents including Microsoft Money, Quicken Online, Yodlee moneycenter & mint.com. I did not try geezeo.com, wesabi.com or Quicken.

mint.com is shaping up to be quite feature complete website and it has the killer\distinguishing feature which makes expense tracking practical and possible. Automatic expense categorization.

Enter an account, say your credit card. It will download the data and categorize the expenses and give you a chart like below with the details.

In comparison, I had to manually categorize all the expenses in Microsoft Money and just gave up when I realized how much work that was. Yodlee moneycenter has the categorization features and other advanced ones such as investment, however mint.com is better designed, for example yodlee logs me out in 2-3 minutes and hence mint.com is more usable.

Features I found useful at mint.com

• Automatic expense categorization (Knows Safeway is groceries). One can override or fix expense categorization
• Custom categories under any parent, this very useful feature was added recently.
• Simple way of setting and tracking budgets
• Can download and work with all our accounts such as bank, credit card and credit union.
• Is secure and you can cancel it with a single button and everything detail stored is gone.
• Very nice pie chart for expenses within fixed periods
• Search functionality for transactions including search by category or vendor
• Can be useful within an hour or less.
• Investment support including tracking performance of each time or portfolio, compare against indices
• Net worth summary page

There are many more that might appeal to others.

Features missing at mint.com

• Expense chart needs work, the pie chart does not remember last search range and resets back to all months. Need more charts including showing increase in categories.
• Graphs for networth growth, this itself will get many of the financial bloggers such as www.1stmillionat33.com using mint.
• No retirement planning

If you live in the US, I would suggest trying it out, it is a major step in saving money.

Start by watching the Mint Demo. Then put a credit card and watch the trends for a week or four.