Monday, December 29, 2008

MINT.COM | the best free way to manage your money

Mint.com_logow  
Click here to sign up.

What is it?

Mint.com is essentially a free online money management software. It allows you to manage your finances and keeps track of your spending habits.

"Mint.com is a modern, powerful, easy and secure Web–based solution for online financial management. And it’s free." ~mint.com

What it does?

Mint.com_homepage

Mint.com consolidates all your online bank, credit union, retirement and investment accounts through its simple, intuitive web-based interface. You log-in anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the login information for your various online financial institutions. All your data is then displayed in Mint via a clean, intuitive interface.

[Great feature] Mint.com also provides personalized recommendations to users by searching thousands of offers to provide you with the best deals out there. It is very interesting because the recommendations are unique to each individual and are made based on the individual's spending patterns. This is where Mint.com actually makes money. If a customer takes up another offer provided by another institution to save money, Mint.com gets a commission for that.

Benefits

  1. It is free.
  2. It is easy to use.
    Setup takes about 5 minutes.
  3. It automatically pulls together your bank, credit union, credit card, retirement account, investment accounts,
    PayPal account and many others.
  4. Mint provides personalized recommendations of how you can save and make money.
  5. Mint alerts you when your credit card bills are due, have a low balance, transactions are made in certain accounts and more.
  6. Mint is secure.
    Click here for Privacy and Security policy.
    Mint provides bank-level data security and industry-leading identity protection.
    Its security and privacy have been validated by VeriSign and TRUSTe.

Check Mint.com for Key Benefits.

What's cool about it?

  1. Mint.com consolidates all your accounts in one easy to manage place.
    It is a web application, so it can be accessed anywhere.
    It automatically updates your information every night as well.

Mint.com_Accounts

2.  Mint even shows you your investment accounts and uses visual charts to indicate how
     your accounts are performing against various indexes.

3.  Mint displays your best and worst performing stocks in your portfolio over a period of time.

Mint.com_Investments

4. Mint provides a detailed overview of all your information upon logging in.
You are presented with an immediate breakdown of all your account balances, alerts (unusual spending),
portfolio performance and budgets.

Mint.com_Overview1

5. Mint also provides a visual representation of your current spending habits which is great for
    anyone interested in keeping track of their spending.

Mint.com_Trends1 

Mint.com_Trends2

6. Mint.edu blog provides personal finance educational information.

Mint.com_Mint.edu

My Synopsis

I highly recommend Mint for anyone who is interested in managing their personal finances. I think more people should be keeping track of this sort of information and Mint provides an easy-to-use, intuitive application to do so. I currently use Mint and Microsoft Money and I must say that Mint is so much easier because it connects to all my accounts automatically. I almost have to do no work; not to mention the various recommendations I receive periodically to save money.

I suggest that you first check out the site and ensure that you will be comfortable using it. This is merely my opinion and I have used a lot of applications like this. This is simply the best online money management software I have seen so far.

Check it out and tell me what you think. Please feel free to tell the community what you think about the software by posting comments. I know many may be interested in using it, but may be a bit hesitant. Others may be using it and may like or dislike some things about it. I look forward to hearing your opinions on Mint. I encourage new users to read through the comments provided by the community and make a well-informed decision as to if Mint is for you. Enjoy!!

Other reviews from around the web

Articles: AppAppeal | The Far Side of Tech | About.com

Videos: TechCrunch40

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