Mint.com
Money is hard to come by these days, so we have to manage as efficiently as possible. How can you get a handle on what you are spending without going crazy or without spending a lot on advisors and financial planners? Well, if you are do it yourself kind of person, then www.mint.com is for you. The online service is a free tool to manage your money and offers daily automatic updates to keep you on top of the details.
Signing up for www.mint.com takes about 5 minutes, but it will take you about an hour to really get set up. Getting started is easy…all you need to do is pick a login name and password and then list the accounts that you want www.mint.com to keep track of for you. You will need to provide user ids and passwords for the accounts so that www.mint.com can login and download your transactions on a daily basis. Mint.com doesn’t store any of your confidential information so there is nothing for a hacker to get if they were to crack in to the database. Smart move for Mint.
Once you are set up, then you now have one place to go to track your finances….from bank accounts to credit cards….all in one place.
Since www.mint.com works with many other individuals that are managing their money, you get access to fascinating data regarding how your account stacks up against other folks using www.mint.com. Even more useful is the ability to save money by using this free tool. According to www.mint.com, they save an average of $1,000 for each new account. How? Well, they will analyze your credit cards and make recommendations for cards with better deals. Can you say 0% for transferred balances? Not bad.
What is the gotcha? The only one I can see is that you have to use a credit card or debit card to really get all the updates automatically. If you spend cash for something, then it will not come in to the reports automatically.
Mint has a few competitors, and some are free and others are not. So if you are thinking about using an online money management tool, you may want to do a little homework.
Tags: financial planners, hacker, Larry Fiorino, money management tool, Tech Topics, www.mint.com
