Motley Fool Spend-Less Kit
For those who have a hard time keeping track of their money, there’s the Motley Fool Spend-Less Kit. It’s a wrapper for your credit or debit card that acts like a check-register. Studies show that when asked to tally up your purchases on the spot, you will spend less. It makes you consciously aware of the amount of money you’re spending, and forces you to re-evaluate the utility (economist-speak for satisfaction) you get from each purchase. Plus, since it acts like a check-register, it can help you balance your checking at the end of the month and spot for fraudulent charges.
Mint.com
If you haven’t tried this awesome aggregate tool yet than you’re missing out. Mint downloads a copy of all of the transactions from the bank accounts you enter (checking, savings, investment/retirement, loans/mortgage) and gives you a dashboard for your finances. Put another way, you give it a bunch of trees, and it shows you what the forest looks like. It breaks things down into how much you spend on groceries, housing, insurance, entertainment, etc. and helps you adjust your spending by making you aware recurring trends. All for free.
Calorie Count
A terrific free tool, Calorie Count does like its name says and gives you the ability to track not only the calories in the food you eat, but the nutrients in it as well. At the end of the day, it gives you an analysis of where you were deficient so you can gage your overall health. It shows trends in key areas like carbs, protein, and fat intake. Also, it lets you track your activities, showing how many calories you burned; as well as your weight, letting you set goals and giving guidance on how to reach those goals over time safely.
Traineo
Traineo is similar to Calorie Count in that it lets you track weight, activities, and to a lesser degree your overall diet, but not at such a granular level as to grade the quality of what you ate. Traineo Plus, the paid version, gives you access to better trends, showing when you are likely to reach your goal based on your weight-loss to date, and tells you exactly how many calories over/under you are in reference to your goal. The free community also has plenty of tips and people to keep you motivated. Also, making your goals publicly known gives you that much more of an incentive to accomplish them, and for this Traineo lets you invite people to be Motivators on your account.
The Hacker’s Diet
The Hacker’s Diet isn’t really a tool, but it is definitely worth mentioning. A book written by AutoDesk founder John Walker, it presents the idea that a.) your body is a system and b.) once you know the how a system works, you can hack the system to improve it. Best of all, it’s available free online. Included in it are tips for tracking and measuring your progress, and how to interpret the analysis it presents. It’s written from the perspective of both the Engineer and the Manager, which for someone like me (a technology management major at a predominantly engineering school) it’s incredibly fascinating.
How about you? Do you have any money or fitness tracking tools you’d like to share?
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