Life-changing websites.

Do yourself a favor.

Check out www.mint.com and www.evernote.com right this very second!

I have been on a Mint soapbox for some time now, but have only recently discovered the joy that is Evernote.

Mint helps your organize your money, for free! It downloads your debit card transactions and allows you to create custom graphs/charts using your own categories. Want to see how much you spent on groceries this month, or in the last six months? Mint will tell you. Want to see how much you spent at CVS, or Target, or on movie tickets in the past year? Mint will tell you.

Mint will also research ways you can make more money- ie, what banks are offering higher interest rates on savings accounts, or lower credit card interest rates. Mint is also kind enough to help you set budgets for each category and will send you an email or text message when you hit your monthly budget for, say, gas or restaurants. Mint will even email you to remind you to pay your bills. Mint is such a good buddy.

Evernote is your "external brain". Evernote lets you paste into it everything you ever wanted to keep track of and has very clever search engines to help you find it later using 'tags' that you create. For instance, I am constantly seeing beautiful rooms on interior design blogs. Instead of printing them and filing them by room type or saving the image on my computer, I simply paste the photo into Evernote and tag it with whatever I choose (green walls, blue couch, Parsons table, etc). Then later I search "green walls" and Evernote will find it!

This is particular helpful if you are into beautiful rooms because the old method (filing by room type) means that if you are searching for something like 'white curtains' that could be in any room of the house you would have to look through all your files.

Or, some people take photos of things with their Iphone or regular camera and paste everything into Evernote. For instance, you could snap a pic with your phone of that awesome wine bottle label so you can remember it later, or you could snap a pic of that business card you received and then throw it away, never to worry again. Think of all the paper items you keep track of- receipts, addresses, coupons- they could all be stored in Evernote an accessed from any computer in the world.

These people are geniuses.