Mint.com - a fresh way to track your money

“The best free way to manage your money.” …or so they say.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Mint.com is a free web site that helps you organize your finances. We “download, categorize, and graph all of your finances automatically every day” is the claim on their homepage. I was intreged so I signed up for an account, its was free after all, and gave it a spin.

Creating and setting up an account was easy. The interface for adding your financial accounts is streamlined and very intuitive. And once your information is in Mint provides a variety of information on your money.

The Awesome Overview Screen
An overview screen shows you the current state of your finances. All of your accounts are listed on the left with up-to-date balanaces and a net worth calculation below it. The page includes alerts -both for low balances and credit limits-, spending trends, and ways that Mint feels you can save money.

Another neat feature was an net income graph that shows your revenues over expenses for the last couple of months. It was nice to be able to see how I faired financialy each month.

The nicest part of this screen is that Mint has all of your financial information consolidates onto one screen. No more logging into a ba-zillion accounts to check balances. One single login to Mint displays all of your information in one place. I am a big fan of one stop shopping.

Transactions
Another feature of Mint is that it downloads not only balances, but all of your financial transactions as well. One click onto the ‘Transactions’ tab and you have your history available to you. Between this tab and the Overview screen, the only thing you are likely to need to log into your bank accounts yourself for is to transfer money.

Trends
All of the data Mint gathers from downloading transactions it displays in a helpful graph on the ‘Trends’ tab. Here you are able to see visually -and in cool colors- where your money is going.

Investments
Just like transactions, all of your investment information is avalible in summary and on a cool chart. This tab shows how your investments have preformed over time as well as individual data for each stock and fund that you own. Again, just about all the information necessary to monitor the health of your investments can be found here. Like I said above only thing you are likely to need to log into your investment accounts yourself for is to buy and sell.

Ways to Save
This is a new tab where Mint attempts to provide you with helpful tips to save you money. Mint looks at what you have and what you have been upto and suggests comparable services that could save you money. This is not my favorite feature on Mint.

Budgeting
A big feature on Mint is the ability to set up budgets. The budgets are more of a reminder system then anything, but they are very nicely done. You set up a budget for the categories that you expect to spent money on. Mint will then alert you when you are getting close to, or have exceeded, your budget. And of course, in the style of Mint, there are graphs and charts to show you how your actual spending compars to your budget.

Conclusion
I am a fan.. Mint provides a consolidated view of all my finances on one, nicely designed, web page. I would highly reconmend, if you haven’t see it already, to head of and give Mint a try.