Making Managing Your Finances Fun!
In a recent blog written by James Sheridan, Senior Vice President and Commercial Lending Officer, he shared why it is important to have a personalized budget and gave a good list of steps to follow as well as a list of priorities. To view his blog click here.

In this post, we are going to build on his list of steps/priorities and show you how managing your finances can be more personal and fun. You may be asking yourself how can budgeting and managing your finances be fun? Well, TBTmyWay online banking services now allows users to manage, track, and interact with all of their finances in one convenient place with a new service called myOFM. The great thing about myOFM is it not only allows users to create and manage a budget but it also allows users to aggregate accounts from other websites, categorize spending, create alerts, manage debts, set goals, view transactions, track spending over time, and view their total net worth.

Here are some specific ways myOFM can benefit your personal management of your finances and make it fun while doing so:

1. Account Aggregation: Why spend all day visiting numerous websites just to check the balances on your various accounts? myOFM allows users to view the balances and transactions from all of their accounts at various financial institutions in one secure network. The primary TB&T accounts that users have access to through their online banking portal should automatically populate inside the myOFM tab. Then with a few easy steps, users can also add many of their external accounts that they hold with other financial institutions. This allows users to have a more complete picture of their financial information.
2. Alerts:  This tool allows users to create an email or text message alert for each account setup within myOFM to notify them of fees being charged, low balance, large deposit or large expense/withdraw. It also gives users the ability to create an alert if a budget has been exceeded.
3. Budgets:  The Budgets view presents a targeted display of users spending and progress to hitting their overall budget each month. After budgets are created, moving forward, by default, budgets will be shown in the bubble form (the Bubble Budgets view allows users to see both the health and the importance of their budgets simultaneously). Users will also have the ability to view and edit their projected income within budgets, helping the users to make budget decisions that balance with their income.
4. Categorize Spending:  The Spending view presents a comprehensive spending wheel displaying what percentage of users spending is in each transaction category. Users can hover over each section of the spending wheel and see how much was spent in each category.
5. Debt Management:  The Debts view is a powerful tool that allows users to see all of their debts in one place and proactively determine an expedited payoff plan.
6. Goals:  This tool helps users plan and visualize long-term financial objectives such as saving for a home or paying off a debt. The Goals view automatically calculates how long it will take to complete each goal and maps it on an interactive timeline, making it easy to see at a glance how close users are to their objectives.
7. Net Worth:  The Net Worth view tracks the net sum of all the assets and liabilities over the past year that users have accumulated.
8. Transactions:  This feature allows users to view transaction information for each account that they have listed within myOFM.
9. Trends: The Trends view presents a graph that is helpful for users who want to see spending trends over time. It shows a six-month history of spending by category along with a green line showing income. This way, users can quickly determine if they are spending more than they are making.

With every New Year, we all create our own list of "New Year’s Resolutions." This year, let’s make our finances one of those top priorities! So, the only question I have now is... will you join me by starting the New Year off right and take advantage of these great tools that myOFM provides? If you answered yes, then get ready to feel more empowered and be more engaged in managing your finances than ever before. Together, we will actually see where our money is being spent and the impact that this spending has on the budgets we create, and not only that, but we can manage all of our accounts through one convenient login and set goals for 2015 and the years to come.


By: Chris Davis
E-banking Manager

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