Sometimes keeping track of your finances just plain sucks. So stop doing it. Here are 7 reasons why you should stop keeping track of your finances.

1. Too Much Effort

You work hard all day, you come home to a messy house, you got to feed the kids, take care of the spouse, and walk the dog. Where do you have time or energy to care about your money? Might as well just quit. I’m sure there will be enough in the bank account to handle whatever you spend. Bank account empty? Just charge it – you’ll find the money next month.

2. Ignorance Is Bliss

If you start digging through all those old papers and unopened bills, you’re just going to get even more stressed and worried than you already are. You might as well just throw them in the recycling. The problem will fix itself eventually anyways.

3. You Have More Than Enough Money

You work hard, you just got a promotion and a raise. Your house isn’t that big, you can handle your mortgage payment, you have always been able to afford magazines, coffees, and movies before, so why should you change that now?

4. You Don’t Need To

You’re covered. You make money, you spend it, it all works out. You’re not worried about retirement, because you probably won’t live that long anyways. Nothing that bad ever happens to you, and if it did, you’d pay for it. If you didn’t have enough, you’d go into debt, which isn’t that big of a deal. Besides, if anything really bad ever happened, your parents or friends would take care of it for you, just like they always have before.

5. Too Many Choices

Should I put my money into my emergency fund or pay off credit card debt? Should I invest in an index fund? Should I rent or buy? Too many questions, too many potential answers. Giving up is easier, and takes less time! If you don’t know the answer, don’t bother asking the question, right?

6. Too Complicated

So you have your spending record spreadsheet, your budget, your multiple bank accounts, investment accounts, and have it all running through Mint, Wesabe, and Rudder. Every week you get your bills, and file them into one of your inboxes, before you scan them onto your computer and back them up online and to your external hard drive. Then you have to spend most of every Saturday just trying to sync and organize all your organizational systems. Even with all these tools, nothing ever balances or makes sense, so why bother?

7. It’s Fun!

Every time you swipe your card, it is like you’re at the casino! Will it go through, will it be denied – who knows?!

Over the last year or two, a number of online websites that help you deal with your personal finances have popped up. They work by aggregating all of your personal finance information, compiling it, and offer back to you an easy to view overview of your finances.

Mint is probably the most popular and common website.

We download, categorize and graph all of your finances automatically every day, so you know where you’re spending, without spending any effort.

While I’ve written on how to create your own spending record, Mint takes all the manual data entry out of the equation, and even offers fancy graphs in return. It simplfies and eases tracking your spending.

Wesabe is another popular website. They basically do the same thing, except instead of having its servers mine your bank account for information, it is a bit more secure by allowing you to simply upload your downloaded bank statements into their system, where they do the same thing. While Mint most likely offers this option as well, Wesabe is more popular amoung the privacy paranoid.

Being Canadian, I couldn’t even register for Mint. Being lazy, Wesabe took a lot of the ease and simplicity out of the equation. Enter Rudder.

A relative newcomer in the online bank account tracking website niche, Rudder offers the ability to both manually upload your bank statements as well as regularly download your statements. In addition, and of personal interest, Rudder actually has access to Canadian credit unions. In addition, it has access to Canadian version of major American credit cards – like Capital One.

When you first sign up for Rudder, you’ll be asked to add accounts, either bank accounts or credit cards. I added my credit union bank account as well as my capital one mastercard. Between these two, this is where I will be doing all of my spending. I rarely, if ever, spend cash.

Once you’ve done that, Rudder will mine those accounts for past and present information. It will then label all of these “transactions” as best as it can. You can help it out by categorizing anything it doesn’t recognize – which for me, was most of it. Luckily, if you’ve bought more than one thing from the same place (say, Safeway), once you classify it as “groceries”, it will label other purchases from the same location in the same category. It takes a little bit of inital effort, but presuambly it will all be recognized and automated.

If you choose to label an expenditure as a “bill”, Rudder can ask you if this will be a recurring bill. You can also go to Settings > Bills to add any recurring bill (like Rent, utility payments, etc).

Last, you can also categorize, label, and predict income. I decided to put in my monthly income as a bit lower of an estimate (as it is not consistent). Once you’ve set up your account, if you return to the main overview, Rudder’s strengths really kick in.

Rudder will not only show you how much money you have now, but it will also show you how much money you will have a month from now. It’ll take your projected income, minus the bills that you have added, and will show you what sort of balance you could have in 30 days.

The problem is that it won’t take into account other “bills” like groceries, but you could easily solve this by putting in your projected expenses for each month (say you are budgeting $400 a month for food, put $400 for a regular bill every month, or $100 a week, and as long as you stay within that budget Rudder can predict how much money you’ll have left).

Another strength Rudder has is calculating averages for you in the “Trends” tab.

Once you’ve categorized your expenses, you can see how much money you’re spending out in restaurants, on average. Because I just signed up for Rudder, it can only average a few months worth. As I continue to use it, the more accurate it will become. I can use that data to then a) predict my budget for upcomming months, or b) see where I can reduce my unnecessary spending to save money.

Rudder Trends will also show you:

• Where you’re spending the most money (which grocery store, restaurant, department store, etc)
• How much you’re spending per visit, on average
• Which months you’re spending the most (ie, does your gas bill go up in the winter?)

All in all, Rudder is slowly becoming a great tool in my personal finance planning. I like the ease of use, the pretty pictures, and the ability to track my spending. I wish that I could set up Rudder to take my bills (cell phone, for example), find the average over the last few months, and use that to predict my bill for the future. At the moment, I have to guess the average, so I wish that it was automated.

At the moment, I’m also pretty sure that Rudder doens’t count negative balances on my credit card against “what’s left” on the home overview. It is easy to just look at the balance and subtract it from “what’s left”, but that’s more step that I wish Rudder did for me.

Do you use Rudder, or Mint, or Wesabe? Is it a primary or secondary tool? What’s your favorite feature? What do you wish it could do?