The Benefits of Mint

While I do enjoy the edible variety of this product, that's not what this post is about. I was reading the latest edition of Fast Company last week (a magazine I would highly recommend) and I came across an article about Mint.com. The guys at Mint.com set out to help the college-aged community get a better handle on their finances. In order to accomplish this, they created a quick and dirty online version of Quicken. Ash and I have used Quicken for our budget the last three years but have found it complicated and very time intensive. Needless to say, when I came across this article I was excited. In about 30 minutes, you can set it up so that all of your account information is downloaded to Mint.com and displayed (in spending categories) in a pie chart mapping your spending habits. It also gives you the option of inputing your monthly budget and comparing your expenditures to your monthly financial goals. The greatest advantage to this tool is that it updates your accounts nightly so you don't have to go in and manually download the transactions from your banks and credit cards. The one downfall to Mint.com is that they can't track investment accounts (yet.) For those of you that are concerned with online security, you may want to check out their forum here regarding this issue. I'll let you poke around the website yourself but for the truly skeptical, they make their money by advertising other financial organization's products in their "ways to save" section. We've only been using it for a week but so far, we are REALLY excited about this service.