Do you talk to your partner about finances? If not, have “the talk”. It may very well save you frustration, save you money, and save your relationship.

I recently read an article on The New York Times, four money talks to have before marriage, and a response at Get Rich Slowly. I agree that this is critical (talking money before you marry could someday save your marriage). But this is not just important for couples considering marriage. A lot of us youngins shack up long before we marry, if we marry at all. So I think these articles need to be re-framed as money talks to have before living together. [...]

This question often comes up among first-time home buyers: What percentage of my monthly income can I afford to spend on my mortgage payment? Does that percentage include property taxes? Private mortgage insurance (PMI) or homeowners insurance? [...]

Holy cow! Personal finance software giant Intuit (makers of Quicken, Quickbooks, and TurboTax) is set to buy online budgeting site Mint.com for $170 million, reports Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch.

Launched in September 2007, Mint.com is the nation’s leading free online personal finance service and now serves over 1.5 million users.

According to an e-mail sent yesterday by Mint.com Founder and CEO Aaron Patzer:

Mint.com will stay the way you like it: free, easy-to-use and constantly improving…after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses…Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers. This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.
I look forward to executing on that vision — for you.

What About Quicken Online?

It’s always seemed to me that Mint.com has been competing with Intuit’s free online budgeting tool Quicken Online, which I’ve praised for its relative ease-of-use compared to the trickier-to-learn, albeit more robust, Mint.com. According to Mint.com’s press release:

Intuit intends to keep both the Mint.com and Quicken Online offerings, with each serving separate and equally important purposes. Mint.com will become the primary online personal finance management service that is offered directly to consumers by Intuit. Quicken Online will connect Quicken customers across desktop, online and mobile to deliver easy, anytime-anywhere access. This will help accelerate Intuit’s ability to create products and services that make managing money easier for all Intuit customers.

Congrats Mint.com! When I first started blogging in 2006, most people I talked to couldn’t even imagine using an online tool to manage their personal finances. We’ve come a long way, Baby!

Budgeting is a lot like exercising. Some people love to do it; the rest of us know we need to do it but we really hate it! To help, I give you Money Under 30’s Really Simple Budget Worksheet. [...]

Ready to take your personal finances to the next level? Quicken is offering up to $20 off on and free shipping on many of its bestselling software products through September 13th, 2009. [...]

The guy with the $50,000 luxury car. The couple with the $3,000 a month loft apartment. The girl who spends $200 a week on locally-grown food. The guy who spends $200 a month on gym memberships and fitness classes. The guy with four motorcycles. Do you know them? These are extreme examples, but most of us have one or two spending weaknesses. Even if we’re otherwise smart with our money—even if we know better—we splurge in a few areas. As long as you limit your splurges and as long as you are sure of the value of those splurges to you personally, your spending weakness is probably a good thing. [...]

I logged into my free Quicken Online account yesterday for the first time in a while. Now that Quicken has about 90 days of data from all of my financial accounts, I started to play around with the trends feature. And I loved it. The “trends” tab on Quicken Online is arguably the free budgeting tool’s best feature, and provides a way to look at your spending that would be incredibly difficult–if not impossible–to create on your own. [...]

Sometimes I’m fascinated by the simplest personal finance concepts—like the difference between keeping money in your checking account versus a savings account. The way I see it, there are a few different models to divide up your cash between checking and savings. You could keep most of your liquid cash in a checking account to always have access to it, you could keep the money you’ll spend for a month in a checking account plus a cushion of several hundred dollars or so, or you could keep as little money as possible in checking and put the rest into the savings to earn some kind of return on your dough—even though it’s not much these days. Which model do you use? [...]

These days, everybody’s looking to save money. And with good reason—the more you can cut back on monthly expenses, the better prepared you’ll be to weather the recession, including the frightening prospect of losing your income. That said, there are a few things to which you should continue to allocate money as long as you possibly can. [...]

When I asked readers how you split expenses with your partner or spouse, a few responded that they maintained separate checking accounts but shared a joint credit card account for monthly purchases like groceries and utilities.

I recently started doing the same thing with my fiancee. We think, at least for the time being, it’s a good idea. But before you do the same, there are a few things you should consider when you decide to add an additional authorized user to your credit card account or become an additional user on your sweetie’s account. [...]