Ming’s Wisdom

Keeping track of finances can be difficult and time consuming, so it’s best left for others to do it for you, saving your time and effort. I recommend Mint for personal budget and bank account tracking. I’ve used it for roughly a year now (or more), and have found that having a summary view of all bank accounts, loans, investments, and credit cards can be very insightful. In addition, all new transactions from all accounts are automatically updated for you without needing to enter them yourself. You can also look at all your month’s transactions to analyze how much you’ve spent on different categories of items, and find trends in your budgeting. I’ve definitely had some trouble with Mint not connecting to some of my accounts as well as it should, but all in all I’d still say it has added enough value to my life that I’d keep using it.

Nutrition is another difficult set of information to keep track of, and most people don’t really track it, since there are dozens of nutrients and vitamins to add up to make sure your daily values are sufficient, and at the same time the need to keep track of protein versus good fat versus bad fat versus complex carbohydrates versus simple sugars etc, as well as PH balancing, etc. I’ve recently discovered NutritionData, which turned out useful in finding the nutrition values of almost all foods, such as 1 cup of chicken soup with skin. It allows you to save the foods and portions that you’ve looked up, and keeps track of your recipes and their nutritional values. Simply going to the site and checking out a few foods can get you thinking about nutrition and how different foods could complement each other for a balanced diet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 20:55 and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.