Vacation!

I slept nice and late this morning, and have been hanging out being unproductive. I think I will probably not do any homework today, but I am going to work on Mock Trial as we have a lot to get done in a very short period to be ready for the season. I am postponing my trip to Staples and Acme Surplus for my yearly supply of pens, legal pads, and some sort of folder/briefcase for another day or two because it will probably be a complete mob scene over there, and I do not really want to get in the middle of it.

One really awesome thing I did today, though, is that I installed the Mint.com application on my iPhone. It took me a little while to set up my accounts there, but now I have full access to all of my financial records, live-updating, at all times. I can view my balance, transaction history, and more. I can also create monthly budgets for various different expense categories, and track how much money I’ve spent on what and how much I have left. My setup is not optimal for this capability, because I have a Statement Savings account, and my ATM card is therfore not usable at POS. So all of my withdrawals are from an ATM, not from a store. If they were from a store (i.e. if I had a debit/credit card), I could set up Mint.com to automatically sort my transactions by category, assigning different merchants to different categories, and thus automatically tracking my budgets. If I bought groceries at Stop&Shop, Mint.com would immediately update my monthly food budget, or whatever budget I had assigned Stop&Shop to, and show me how much money I have left to spend on food this month. Once I get a credit card or checking account (when I turn 18), I am definitely going to take advantage of this feature. This program is going to be incredibly useful.