Mint.com is a free, online, personal budget and financial planning website. I’ve been using it ever since it won the award for best company at TechCrunch40 last year. I’ve found the website to be fairly useful and highly accessible. It’s a great way to track all your income and costs (from credit cards, saving accounts, checking accounts, investments, etc.) and just consolidate your financial information into a single website. The site easily allows you to see where you’re spending your money, as well as potential ways to save money. More details below the jump.
Mint will consolidate all your financial information and retrieve it automatically from all of your different financial institutions. This allows you to aggregate your data and see how much money you’re spending every month, and where you’re spending it. You can set your own budget up and have it track it automatically, or even compare your spending to people in the area you live. It also will analyze your finances and make recommendations for better credit cards and savings account, as well as alert you to any charges to your checking account that might not be legitimate. Finally, it will track and notify you (you can set up email or even txt notifications) if you are nearing your credit limit, running low on funds or if any major purchases or withdrawals were made.
In sum, it’s free and works well. I’ve found it most beneficial on a month-to-month/longer-term basis where I can compare how much money I’m spending from one month to the next. It also gives you a great overall picture of your finances as to the direction your finances are headed in. I also use it to give me an easier picture of the balance of my money between savings, checking, and investments (while also comparing that to how much I’m running up on my Chase Freedom Credit Card).
Check it out, put all your accounts on it, and tell me what you think.
I just added your blog to my gmail reader, I’m a fan.
so is this mint thing worth it if I only really spend out of one account? Do you think it’d still be helpful?
thanks for reading!
it’s a tough call for one account. i would say you could go ahead and set it up and see if you like it under the assumption that in the future you will be adding more accounts (credit card, savings, and checking are the big three everyone should have with investment coming after) and then it’ll be ready to go once you do so. with that said, once you set it up you probably don’t need to check it more than once a month unless you’re finding that useful.