Money Hacks

Do you have a roommate? A partner? A friend to whom you’ve loaned money? Buxfer is a fantastic web-based tool for anyone in a situation with shared expenses. The site’s programmers write:

As graduate students, having food almost always meant eating out with a bunch of fellow sufferers somewhere on Craig Street. With such a high rate of accumulating bills, our memories and scraps of paper were just not enough. So we wrote a small simple script to keep track of our debts. And boy, did we love it! Well, we thought maybe the others would find this useful too.

You can learn more about Buxfer by:

• Taking a tour of the site
• Reading the blog with updates on developments
• Viewing the FAQ to get into the nitty-gritty

Where was this when I was in college? (Oh, right — the whole internet thing hadn’t come of age yet.)

Jason writes with a time-tested money hack, but one many people are prone to forget:

Go through your monthly bills. Eliminate/reduce ones that you don’t need. Take the amount of money that you would save on a monthly basis and add it to your monthly savings deposit. I live paycheck-to-paycheck, and literally have less than $15 in my savings account. But I was able to figure a way to have about $40 that I automatically deposit just by reducing a few monthly bills (getting the slower speed cable internet, canceling a music subscription service, etc). Seems small, but it’s sure better than nothing!

Though these amounts seem small, he’s off to an awesome start. He’s making exactly the right choices to set himself up for financial success. Congratulations, Jason!