Daily Nerdy

I recently heard about Mint.com from a buddy who was using it. Mint.com allows you to provide financial login, username and password, details and it will automatically pull transactions, balances, and all sorts of additional details from your various financial institutions. Then it will organize everything and provide an amazing amount of statistics, graphs, and money saving tips. At first I was very skeptical about providing any financial login details to a third party, yet alone a web application who purpose is to make a profit. As I dug further reading articles, and Googleing, I quickly realized Mint.com is very trusted company, with copious amounts of funding backed by the who’s who in silicon valley. In addition, Mint.com cannot actually complete/charge any financial transactions and they anonyomize every user, only asking for e-mail, zipcode, and a login password. After all, in reality we should be more worried about trojans and keyloggers grabbing financial institution login details then Mint.com.

So I took the big plunge, signed up, and provided my login details for my checking, savings, and major credit card accounts. Instantly, the application filled with details about my spending habits and income sources; details I never spent the time to calculate but were nonetheless eye opening and tremendously informative. $112 last month eating at Chipotle, over $300 in gasoline in November, $25 this month already at iTunes.

I spent about a good hour looking over all my transactions, properly tagging, and assigning the proper category to each charge and credit. After that, I was able to get an amazing snapshot and graph view of my spending habits, and which categories I can and furthermore need to cut back on. Finally, they have a powerful alerts feature which can send e-mails or even SMS text messages based on a variety of conditions such as a large deposit, a large withdraw, a payment due, or an interest rate changed.

Mint.com is an amazingly powerful financial tracking and planning tool, I highly recommend it. The benefits of Mint.com would be even further magnified if used by a small business, allowing the business to track income, expenses per category, and tag transactions as tax deductible. If your still unsure about security at least just sign up for an account and tinker around and browse the interface without providing any financial institutions details.