A few months ago (and by few months I mean more than 3) I heard about a little gem of a website called Mint.com.    At the time I heard about it, Mint was just entering it’s public beta period and so only offered a small amount of real usability and functionality.   It took me an inordinate amount of time to do some of the most basic functionality and sometimes things would break for no reason.

I still gave it a shot, understanding it was a beta and those things are almost unavoidable.   I also figured it would be something that would get better (and more usable) with time.

I apparently was correct.

I recently went back to the website and logged in to see what progress had been made. I was pretty well impressed. I should probably talk about the service in general so you have a basis of understanding.

Mint offers you a place to see all of your finances, aggregated, and allows you to see at-a-glance trends in your spending.  It does this by linking to your various bank, credit card and (now) investment accounts, and pulling down the transaction histories.   It does this using industry standard secure connection mechanisms, so you need not really worry – it’s quite secure.

Once it pulls down your transaction histories it automatically categorizes each item in the transaction logs, though this isn’t done perfectly and you’ll probably still want to go through and categorize by hand.    Once you do that though you can set it up to remember how you categorized something and to automatically do the same next time.

Once it has done all of that, you can see at a glance trends in your spending,    for instance it will show you how much money you’re spending on gas,  but also how much out of your total spending that is.

You can also set budgets for how much you are willing to spend on any given area and it will keep track of how much you have spent out of that budget.   You can be as general or specific as you want/need to.

It also alerts you of any bills you have coming up,   or if certain trigger conditions you set are met.    I have mine also sending me a weekly summary of my finances,   so I know what’s going on.

In all, I’ve found it incredibly easy to use,  and incredibly informative.    Sure there are other applications out there that provide most of this functionality (Quicken, anyone?) but those are not a.) free and b.) easy to use.   This is both.

They recently added in investment accounts, something that was missing when I first signed up.   Most of the functionality there is still unreleased as it’s in closed beta, but should be available soon enough.    You can currently see the money in your accounts and have that kept track of.

In short – Mint offers a lot of functionality, for a really good price (Free),   and in some cases can even save you money.      Check them out at www.mint.com

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