Thoughts on Learn Vest for Families

I was contacted a while back by an editor at Huffington Post to write a piece on money for an upcoming special they’re doing for HuffPo women. She heard me speak in a session at BlogHer last year and liked the way I spoke about living authentically and being honest about your financial state.

I am honored. Truthfully, I am beyond honored. To me The Huffington Post is like the ultimate destination as a blogger. It’s respected as a news source and it only “employs” (I use quotes because I’m not sure anyone there is paid to write.) top quality writers. I’ve never investigated how to write for HuffPo because I was never confident enough to try.

So to be asked to write had me floating on air for days.

I came crashing down when I realized I felt like a fraud. See, the thing is I haven’t been walking the talk lately. Never fear, I haven’t gotten myself back into any kind of sorry situation, but I had started to slip into the dirty old habit of not paying attention.

This was always the risk with me. I work like a superstar in crisis mode, always have. But when things get a bit easier and the reins loosen, I have been known to run wild.

I wasn’t exactly running wild this time, but I was perhaps living beyond my means. The truth is I say perhaps because I don’t know if I was because I wasn’t really paying attention. And that, unconscious living, is my single biggest money sin. If I’m  not diligent about every penny in and every penny out, then I lose track and allow a few more treats and tricks then normal and before I know it, I’m bouncing checks and forgetting bills.

Luckily, I caught myself before anything bad happened. Luckily my biggest sin was probably take-out tacos on my birthday, (my slip-ups have certainly shrunk in these last few years) and now I’m back on track.

One little tool I’ve discovered in my mad hunt to tighten the reins is a site called LearnVest. From what I can tell so far, it’s a bit like Mint in that you can set a budget and link it to all your accounts so that you can track your spending and debt. The difference seems to be, and I hate to say this out loud but it’s true, is that it’s more engaging. I know, money should be serious but if I’m being honest, I need my money management to be a little fun or else I just won’t do it.

LearnVest was started by a woman and in addition to the straight forward money management stuff, there is a community aspect to the site with classes, tutorials and paid services that include support from a certified financial planner. So not only is it one stop shopping as far as everything you’d need for saving, spending and tracking, but it also has more reasons for me to visit the site and stay involved. With other sites like it, I’ve been known to input all my data and then slowly start to ignore the emails alerting me to things because they stopped making sense as I never updated the site enough. I’m not saying Mint isn’t a great site. It is. It’s just that so far I don’t work well with it. I’m hoping Learn Vest will be different.

This isn’t in any way a sponsored post. LearnVest people have no idea who I am and neither do the folks at Mint. This is just me, trying to be authentic and let you in on the ways I do it. I’ll keep you posted on how successful I am using LearnVest. Here’s hoping for growing wealth!

And one last thing: I know some of you are sick of these, but this one is absolute perfection. I’m pretty sure at some point I’ve said every, single one of these things.