The ‘Get Your Finances Off to a Good Start’ Giveaway!

This contest is now closed.

A new year means new financial resolutions. And to help you along, Almost Frugal is giving away a fantastic financial planning tool package to help you succeed (finally!) in keeping your New Year’s Resolutions.

A year’s subscription to Pear Budget. I’m so excited about this one! I think Pear Budget is a great service, and easy to set up. And beyond being easy to set up, it’s easy to use, which will make tracking your saving and spending second nature in no time.

What else do I like about it? You’re not adding any sensitive financial information to the system, so it’s completely secure. And I love that you can access it from anywhere: my husband could enter his receipts on his lunch break at work, while I might want to check our budget from a computer at school. It’s customizable too- you don’t need to fit into one category or another in order to use it.

My only quibble? It’s a picky and persnickety one: I wish that you could choose the currency you’re entering your data in (even though it makes no difference whatsoever).

Edited to add: Guess what? It turns out that you can change your currency! Charlie writes: “just click on your e-mail address (upper right corner of the page) and there’s a place where you can input your currency (it defaults to ‘$’, but can take anything).”

A year’s subscription to Green Candy. What’s Green Candy? It is an annual subscription program and financial assessment tool that “aims to get Gen Y-ers on the right financial track before the debt hits the fan.” While designed for the 18 to 34 year-old set, Green Candy is actually full of good advice and information. Using lessons and exercises in the ‘pods’ of budgeting, debt, investing, risk management, major purchases, charity and Gen-Y problems, Green Candy “encourages users to start their journey to financial responsibility by focusing on their most daunting financial weak spots.” Check the volume on your computer before clicking on the link, as there’s an automatic video launch.

A deck of NURU’s Personal Finance Cards: 30 ultra-thin, waterproof, and durable pocket-sized plastic cards that take potentially complex topics and break them down into easy, everyday language, using simple examples to make the concepts stick. Such topics include investing, loans, credit, insurance, retirement vehicles, etc.

What’s more, those who purchase Personal Finance will be able to access the deck’s content on their mobile phone or computer. These cards actually really helped me when I was studying for my Economics’ exam- they make complicated information easy to understand!

A beta subscription to Pocket Smith. PocketSmith takes a unique calendar-based approach to your money that you can easily identify with and use. This makes working with real-world forecasts fast and easy. You enter your goal, and the amount of money you can dedicate to meeting the goal, and the system shows you ways of getting there.

These four tools will work together and help you be smarter about money and your finances. I’ll be posting over the next few months on my progress in keeping my financial resolutions for 2009, using these tools and others.

There are four ways to enter:

1. Leave a comment on this post with your financial resolution for 2009.
2. Tweet about this on Twitter, and make sure I find out about it.
3. Post about this giveaway on your blog, then make sure I find out about it.
4. Stumble any post from Almost Frugal and make sure I find out about it.

This contest begins on Monday, January 5, 2009 at 12 noon GMT and ends on Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 12 noon GMT. It is open to entries worldwide. Best of luck!

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