School teaches us a lot of things. It teaches us basic biology, the history of our nation, how to use the quadratic formula, and so much more. One thing school doesn’t teach us is how to track our expenses, budget our money, or make our money work for us. Sadly, it is up to individuals to teach ourselves how to budget and track our expenses. In this article, I will outline key financial tools that millions of other people and myself use on a daily basis. These tools should help you get a better outlook on your income and how you spend your money. As usual, none of this is financial advice, and please do your own research before using any of these services. 

Personal Capital 

Personal Capital is an easy-to-use dashboard that lets you track your bank accounts, credit cards, and investment accounts, in one easy place. If you’ve always wondered what your net worth is, Personal Capital clearly calculates and displays your net worth on the home page. For people with more assets, like cars and homes, Personal Capital can also help you track and manage the worth of those assets. The platform also sends periodic and personalized emails to you updating you regarding your monthly spending habits with tips on how to better understand your spending, saving, and investing habits. Even if you don’t have a huge income and not many assets, using Personal Finance will help you better plan for your future, whether it’s paying your student loans or saving for retirement. 

Yahoo Finance 

Yahoo Finance is one of the most used financial and investment tools on the market. This free service allows users to track and see all their investment accounts in one place. The platform also lets users create stock watchlists and track investments by manually inputting them. However, the platform gives users the opportunity to link brokers and automatically track stock movements, purchases, sales, dividends, and options activity. For those interested in tracking their cryptocurrencies on the platform, Yahoo Finance supports a whole host of cryptocurrencies that you can manually add to your portfolio. However, at the moment, Yahoo Finance does not support linking with cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets. 

TipRanks

Let me start off by saying that price movements within the stock market are hard to predict and very few financial advisers and professionals can accurately determine the true value of a stock because the price of a stock has so many varying components that contribute to it. That being said, TipRanks offers users the ability to view finance professionals’ price targets for different stocks as well as their high, medium, and low estimates. Professionals also give a stock one of three ratings, Buy, Sell, or Hold. These three ratings give users a better idea of what professional investors are considering for that stock. Although TipRanks cannot give you exact predictions, it can definitely give you an idea regarding what the professionals are saying about the stock. 

Personal finance is a key aspect of maturity and college is the best time to teach yourself how to track your finances and expenses. Tracking your spending can be intimidating at first, however, if you never learn to track your finances, you may find yourself stuck in debt that you never even knew you had. Additionally, if you let your money sit in a bank and don’t touch it, you will lose your money to inflation. That is why investing at a young age is extremely important so that you let time do the work for you. Always do your own due diligence and don’t invest in anything unless you’ve done plenty of research.