I’ve recently decided to take control of all my finances. I began my downloading and installing GnuCash. GnuCash is a free alternative to Quicken and Microsoft Money that runs on Windows and Linux, so if I ever decide to dump Windows completely, I’ll have a program I’m familiar with that I can use in Linux. The next thing I did was sign up for my company 401(k). I elected to have 10% of my pay go towards my 401(k) even though my company only matches 25% of the first 6%. Then I opened up a savings account at my local branch. The last couple of days I’ve been reading some personal finance blogs and decided to open up an Orange Savings account with ING Direct. I’m going to use my bank’s savings account as an emergency fund and the ING account to make money. To keep track of everything, I created an account on Mint.com. Mint.com can log into all my web accounts (banking, credit cards, and investments) and summarize everything for me. Finally, to track my net worth, I created an account at NetworthIQ. I have to manually enter in my income, expenses, and liabilities for it to tell me what my net worth is.

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