Keeping Your Finances Mint-y Fresh

We all want to be better with our money (at least I do), but is it just me or is it not a pain to track all of it? Where are you spending those hard-earned dollars that seem to flow out as fast as they come in? Are you dropping cash at Whole Foods like a Halo 3 addict drops cash on Red Bulls and snack cakes? No? That's just me? Damn...

But it is an important topic during the most consumer-frenzy of times right now as people invade every retail outlet known to man for their Black Friday deals. It looks like things have gone to a new level this year with places opening up at 1 freaking AM. Ugh. So how to tame the spending beast and keep a few more sheckels in your pockets or at least know where those hard-earned coins are heading? For me, I am trying Mint.com, seen here in a delightful photo.

Mint.com is part of an ever-growing wave of personal finances Web sites designed to help you track your expenses, figure out where you are killing yourself and even offering a list of deals that could save you money based on services you are currently using. So, whether it's Mint, Wesabe, Mvelopes or a potential Web-based version of Quicken, there is certainly more resources than ever (with Mint and Wesabe being free) to help you in the quest to manage the almighty dollar.

At its core, Mint pulls in information from each of the financial institutions (banks, credit unions and credit card companies) you provide to it and then categorizes your cash flow for you. This obviously begins with a leap of faith in providing to Mint all of the necessary log-in information needed for Mint to automatically gather all of this information and there is a key crux of the matter: Are you comfortable with your financial information being pulled in real-time by a 3rd party? The folks at Mint do go into a fair amount of detail here about what they do to protect your critical information, from encryption in the data transfers, using the same tool as many large banks for gathering your information and even hacking their own site.

Once you are into Mint, the site allows you to get an overview of each of the accounts you have enabled Mint to pull data from. Here is a snapshot of my own account (with the more critical information blurred out from your nosey types), but at least giving you an idea of how Mint displays your transaction information.

Mint can also break down your spending into nifty pie and bar charts by category as well.

In addition, Mint seeks to provide you with offers to save you money by doing an analysis of your current credit card rates, spending habits, monthly bills, etc. Again, this gets down to a matter of whether you find this like a creepy financial Big Brother eyeballing your accounts or a personalized way to provide relevant offers. Of course, these offers don't hurt our buddies at Mint too much since I am sure there is a financial benefit for them if you end up signing up for the offers. There has to be some way to pay for a free site. I am more prone to think of these as being an improved means by which to view some potentially money-saving offers (although I am not sure how the offer below saves me much money right now since I am looking to pay down a balance and would rather enjoy a 7.9% APR vs. 13.74%):
So here's a quick summation of the whole Mint shooting match:

Good Times
- Pulls together information/financial transactions from a wide range of financial sources
- Mint categorizes items automatically and while it may be off on occasion, it is pretty simple to change the categories on a one-off or permanent basis.
- Interesting feature to compare potential savings or deals based on accounts you have or purchases you have made.

Ehh
- While it is great at pulling in past transactions, Mint does not have any features (as of yet) to put in future payments, credits, etc. In this sense, having a personal financial program like Quicken or Money really is a big benefit.
- No support for investment account information
- For the privacy-phobic, it may be scary to have a third party pulling all of your financial information into one place.

I think it is well worth a try since it's free and easy enough to stop the service if you are not finding benefit to it. In the end, it is like almost anything when it comes to money - if you are not being vigilant about it and making use of your personal finance tools, no amount of snazzy gadgetry is going to do you much good.