personal finance and budgeting

In 2006, recent Harvard grad Alexa von Tobel was headed for a job at Morgan Stanley. But though she would soon be managing the bank’s investments, she realized she didn’t know the first thing about her own finances. Most financial guides seemed to be written for middle-aged readers with millions in assets, rather than recent college grads. "I was reading every book I could find, but none of them spoke to me," she says. So she came up with the idea for LearnVest, an online personal-finance resource for young women like her, and ended up writing an 80-page business plan.

After two years at Morgan Stanley, von Tobel entered Harvard Business School in 2008. But upon winning a business plan competition held by Astia, a non-profit that supports women entrepreneurs, she took a five-year leave of absence and invested $75,000 of her Wall Street earnings to start LearnVest in November. She quickly enlisted advisors, including Betsy Morgan, the former CEO of the Huffington Post, and Catherine Levene, the former COO of DailyCandy, to help develop the site’s content and technology. In January 2009, she secured $1.1 million in seed funding from executives at Goldman Sachs.

LearnVest’s site launched a year later and has since signed up more than 100,000 members. It offers online budgeting calculators, video chats with certified financial planners on the company’s staff, and free e-mail tutorials on topics such as opening an IRA. The company earns revenue from advertising and by referring its users to companies such as TD Ameritrade. In April, after just four weeks of fundraising, von Tobel closed a $4.5 million investment round led by Accel Partners, which has also invested in Facebook and Etsy. (Incidentally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lived in the same dorm as von Tobel at Harvard.)

Von Tobel likens LearnVest to an online version of The Suze Orman Show, but with the goal of reinforcing positive finance habits early on. “Suze Orman helps 45-year-old women get out of debt,” she says. “Why not reach 20-year-olds to keep them from getting into debt?”

Life on the fast track can be taxing. With the ever-growing list of responsibilities, we have more and more bills to pay and an even longer set of reminders and tasks there is to keep track of. Life on the fast track can be taxing.

In order to help reduce the burden of remembering the things you need to do and actually focus on the task at hand; we have 2 great iPhone apps to recommend. Both of these apps have been featured on MakeUseOf before: NotifyMe and Bills.

This week, we will be giving away 5 promo codes for each application. Find out how you can get one, after the jump.

But first let’s take a look at the apps individually.

NotifyMe 2

NotifyMe 2 is the updated version of NotifyMe and only supports iOS4. At the very core, it is still a reminder application. You create tasks/reminders which are synced over the air to NotifyMe’s servers. When your tasks are due, you receive a push notification sent to your iPhone.

All tasks/reminders can also be accessed online via the cloud server, notifymecloud.com and can be used to track your list of reminders easily.

In this updated version, you can also create local reminders which are stored on your device. This is a huge help you are only looking to create short-term reminders without internet access.

NotifyMe 2 also supports task sharing — any reminder can be shared with any authorised NotifyMe 2 user and will appear on their upcoming screen.

For a more in-depth review of the previous version (which will also provide you with a rough concept of how the app works), please read Never Forget Anything Again With NotifyMe for iPhone

Bills

Bills (also known as Bills ~ on your table) is a simple payment tracking application. This app helps you track pending bills and their corresponding due dates efficiently and elegantly as well.

Bills can be set to automatically repeat daily, weekly, monthly or annually. When a payment is due, you’ll receive a push notification with a gentle reminder (or pre-reminder, which you can set to occur days prior).

For a more in-depth review, check out Never Forget To Pay Another Bill Again With Bills ~ On Your Table

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

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