Mint.com

Hello folks, another Friday here. Today I want to talk about Mint.com, a banking website. It's been around since late 2007

Now, my first qualm with the idea is that you have to put in ALL you bank accounts, credit cards, etc. to use it. Hello, identity theft, is that you calling? But, the accolades of the site's security and privacy are high and praised, so I guess it's worth it. Once again, my husband is the one who turned me onto it, pretty much by default (he was already using it when we got married). However, I now check it more often than he does, mostly because I'm paranoid about being charged multiple times for a purchase (happened on three occasions so far since I've had a credit card), and I love to see "where my money goes."

The concept is pretty simple, actually. It sorts all charges (restaurant, entertainment, utility bill, shopping, gas, etc.) and creates a big pie chart. Within each section you can see the breakdown in another pie chart (food & dining is broken into groceries, fast food, restaurants, bars, coffee shops), and then each of those makes another pie chart if clicked on (like in 'fast food' the pie chart is made up of the different fast food places you go to). You can make it do these pie charts for any set number of months, from the past year to the past month, and any combination in the middle (like how much money did you spend on movies last summer... yikes!). Oh, and if you don't agree with the way it sorted something (for instance, we consider Subway fast food but I think Mint originally thought it was a restaurant), you can change rules and then it'll back-fix and future-sort from that point on.

Something good... you can compare month-to-month pretty easily. Something even better... Mint will recommend credit cards for you based on your credit history and where you spend your money. It recommended a great card for my husband and myself (we didn't go with it in the end, though), that gave 5% back if you charged more than $200/month on dining out and entertainment (and it had a broad definition of entertainment), and some other good rewards. Something pretty cool... you can set budgets (or use default averages as budgets), and on your home page, it'll show you a bar graph on how you're doing on different budgets throughout the month (we have one for food and one for entertainment, for instance). The only bad thing about budgets are expenses which hit only a few times a year (like car insurance or tuition) make it seem like you went over in an area (like Education) at first.

Not only can it let you know whenever you have a credit card bill coming up, you can also set it to alert you via email or text message whenever your available credit drops below a certain number, or you make a purchase over a certain amount, or even when you have a bill due in xx days.

The really strange things about Mint is that the people who need to use it the most don't. The average user (and there are over half a million users) makes more than $100k/year, meaning most people who live at the poverty line or are working minimum-wage jobs aren't using this great tool. Because it's so easy to use, I really don't understand why they don't jump on the bandwagon (unless people are stubborn and are still using Quicken. yikes). The only thing I can come up with is that they aren't reading enough and therefore do not understand the there's not as much risk involved as an onlooker may assume.

One thing I wish... that I had used it during graduate school to better track how many thousands of dollars I spent on books. Let's not lie, Amazon and Half.com got a huge chunk of my salary for two years.

Do you use Mint? Quicken? Wesabe? Geezeo? something else? tell us about how you like it.