Things I can recommend that I personally use.

I will be creating blog posts about these various tools and services. There will be some notable which I will also be writing posts about. Any book mentioned in the other links section is a book I have read and feel that it was a good choice for me to read and that I got something out of it, I have specifically avoided books which are more “general attitude adjusting” like ‘Rich dad, poor dad’ (it is worth a read) and others in that category which you will often find in these lists.

Services I use

• Tiller
  For budgeting this is the most simple and effective system I have run across and I am very happy to have found it. They have a free 30 day trial so it is well worth it to check out. You can export to Excel or a database or whatever, but the key is that “you own your own data”. The default budget planner is great, but they have additional ones as well if you follow specific financial books. One of the keys of tiller is that you manually go through your finances, but for those who prefer to have them automatically categorized there is autocat. You can also import from mint and from PersonalCapital. Also find them on fb.

• PersonalCapital
  PersonalCapital, PC is geared more toward using their in-house finacial advisor services and I am not going traditional routes so I would be poorly served by a traditional financial analyst and manager. However, they have great graphs and at-a-glance views of your finances also for the FI/FIRE folks the investment parts are far superior to Mint. I am testing the waters with PC right now and am using it in conjunction with mint.com

• Mint
  Mint is starting to be a bit dated these days and the offers are getting slim, but it is still one of the better finance aggregators around. I provide my CPA with a login each year to Mint and he has no issues whatever in organizing all my expenses. It is free to use as they make money on referring people to partners. I would most likely switch to PC except I have many years of data in Mint.

• Credit Karma
  The best free credit monitoring services that I use to check my credit report at least once per week. It’s surprising the amount of changes that your credit score can go through depending on charges and things and you can see the track of your credit score over time.

Credit cards

• links forthcoming.

Specific Tools

• Vanguard
  Vanguard is where you need to keep any index funds you have, the fees are so low that over the period of time that most FI folks are working, it can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars difference simple by using only Vanguard. There are a few like iShares and them which show as lower, but often require trading fees.

• Netlify - Build, deploy, and manage modern web projects
  Netlify is what you are viewing now (this site is with them) and is free up to a very generous amount of traffic. I use it with the static site generator “Hugo”, if you would like, you can easily set up a hugo-based website on netlify literally by clicking here and then just giving it a name to use as a repository in your Github account. It’s free, secure, fast and easy and if you are used to markdown and github then you are good to go. Plus, no need to worry that your Wordpress gets hacked, static site gen is secure. Additionally, your site is kept in version control and with a static site generator that uses markdown so if you need to migrate to a new system it is simple.

Videos

• TED
  TED talks, interesting people talking about (mostly) interesting things.