Whether you earn a little or a lot, it’s always wise to budget and plan your finances smartly. Common mistakes that most people would make when it comes to money is getting too deep in debt, paying bills late, and not knowing how to save for the future. You can avoid making these mistakes by always keeping track of where your money goes and knowing what you can spend on.

Here are some steps that you can use for managing your money wisely:

Step 1: Set your financial goals
  
Financial goals reflect things you want to do with your money within a certain period of time. Setting these goals will help you understand the value of money and encourage prudent spending. Be sure to know how long you should plan for each goal.

Are they short, medium or long term goals? Which one of the following are your financial goals?

• Buying a house
• Buying a car
• Starting a family
• Child’s education plan 
• Traveling
• Medical and Health Insurance
• Saving for retirement 

Step 2: Know where your money goes to
  
After setting your goals, start developing a spending plan so that it’s easier to achieve your goals. Remember that your aim is not to cut your budget but to note the direction of your spending.

With this you will know: 

• Where and how you spend your money
• How much you owe monthly
• How much is left at the end of the month

Step 3: Assess your spending habits
  
If you find that you have nothing left at the end of the month, it’s time to assess your spending habits. Look through your list of expenses and determine if they are a necessity or luxury item.

Look out for the following warning signals of bad spending habits that may lead to real money problems: 

• You use your savings to pay current bills
• You take new loans to pay for old ones
• You owe more than you earn
• You buy on impulse even when you know you cannot afford it 

Step 4: Write down you spending plan
  
A spending plan can help you manage your finances. You can also target areas where spending is out of control and also set a clear path for saving.

You can start making your own spending plan by using this simple guide: 

• Establish your monthly total income
• Add up your total expenses including fixed monthly bills, loan repayments, rentals and daily living expenses, etc
• Put aside a fixed sum of money to meet emergencies or seasonal expenses (e.g. school fees, road tax, insurance renewals)

Source: www.bankinginfo.com.my

It has been an exciting days for us for the past 30 days. During the past 30 days, our users grow to more than 500 users. We have been receiving a lot of great feedback as well as some new features requests.

For those who haven’t notice, from the day one, we publicly released Money2Manage, the following milestone has been achieved:

• Mobile version of Money2Manage – you can now able to access the program via your mobile phones. You can check your current balance as well as adding new transaction.
• Expenses Tracker migration wizard – migrate from your current Expenses Tracker account. This migration wizard will migrate all your accounts, transactions, categories and payees to Money2Manage.com
• Last but no least: A tons of enhancement and bugs fixed as per below:

Enhancement:

• Amount textbox is annoying [fixed]
• Put secure modules in more secured mode [fixed]
• When select -new payee-, no progress wheel shown [fixed]
• Do not allow user to enter ":" [done]
• Recalculate CategoryName char limit  [done]
• User Actual PayeeName and CategoryName instead of PayeeId and CategoryId [done]
• Setup: wrong validation for lesser end day [done]
• Finance summary wrong selected year [fixed]
• Improve database performance by using GetCount() [done]
• Implement Ajax update progress wheel [done]

Bugs:

• Modified Transfer fund does not effect edited info like date. [fixed]
• Report not properly show for Deposit and Withdraw item [fixed]
• Wrong total amount calculation for Main item in Yearly and Monthly report [fixed yearly and monthly]
• When a month selected in a report, wrong end date calculated (ex. Dec 2006) [fixed]
• When user selected a category, progress keep appearing [fixed]
• When a category/payee deleted, previous category/payee in a transaction should be identified as new [fixed]
• When new category added with new subId, the new subId is not being created [done]

Soo what's coming up next? Stay tune for my next post.

Finally, I managed to setup this blog using BlogEngine.NET. 

BlogEngine.NET is an open source blog engine under .NET. I will use this blog to post new updates regarding Money2Manage software.

Please stay tunes for more updates here.