The first advice diet gurus give you when you embark on a diet is to keep a diet diary. After all, how can you change your eating habits if you don’t know what you are eating?

The same principle applies to money management. If you don’t know where your money is going, how will save any of it? But how are you going to do that aside from keeping track of your expenses on a spread sheet?

Good news! Online tools takes the onus out of counting up your pennies. There are a number of tools out there, but the one that I use is Mint.com. Mint is a product of Intuit, the same people who produce Turbo Tax. Mint is free, my favorite price point. It helps you organize your money by logging in (with your permission) to your bank accounts and categorizes your expenses. There are generic categories, but you can add your own. Once your categories are set up, the only thing you need to do is take a few minutes going over your spending once a month to make sure everything is categorized properly.

You have access to bar and pie graphs (like the one pictured) which captures the low down on your monthly and yearly spending. Nothing hits home like seeing where your money goes.

A real plus to using a service like this is using the categories. A the end of year you can pull up a list of tax-deductible expenses to use when calculating your taxes and have an exact total instantly. What a plus.

Another organizing technique is to put the due dates for your monthly bills on a calendar. I use my iCal calendar on my computer, but there are online tools like Don’t Forget the Milk.com that will send you automated reminders in your email.

If you have any other simple organizing technique let us know with a comment!