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Mint.com is the first money management tool that really is easy and intuitive enough to use that I actually stuck with it and saved money! With the economy in such a downward spiral the last couple of years I have heard it over and over again how hard it is to live on a budget and cut costs because you have to. I know I have had those conversations many times in my own household and despite working out a budget and plan to stick to, we inevitably find months where we just don’t know how we spent that much money or find ourselves saying “where did it all go, we didn’t buy anything big this month”. Like many people I have tried to implement tools like automatic bill pay, Quicken, and MS-Money to help keep track of bills, show trends of money spent, and forecast where we will be in the future but to no avail. They take a lot of work to manage and linking them to all of the other accounts and transactions to minimize my own input leaves something to be desired. You can have the best money management plan in the world but if you don’t stick to your budget, it really doesn’t matter because you won’t save money. And in the world of credit cards and loans, as I myself am for convenience and reward points, it’s easy to $20 yourself to death and not realize how much money is flowing out the door. So when I heard about Mint.com I got really excited and decided I needed to check it out. So if you haven’t heard about Mint.com or haven’t started using it yet to manage your finances read on and you just might want to start if the economy and budgeting weigh on your mind at all.

One of the best things about Mint.com is that it is a free financial planning software tool. And that isn’t even the best thing in my opinion because I am willing to pay for a money management program or money saving system to help me manage my finances and keep everything accounted for and within budget if it works. I purchased and used Microsoft Money and Quicken both and took the time to set them up but it never really worked for me for some reason. After that effort I went back to creating my own spreadsheets to manage money and budgets in my household and that took too much time and effort too to consolidate and create financial reports that were meaningful. In the end what I really wanted was something that was easy to use and tracked my spending and would roll it up into different views for me so I could quickly see where the money was going, if we were staying within the financial plan, and what we could “realistically” change to manage money better. I say realistically because we have often said we will do this or that to save money or stay within the budget only to find out that we aren’t disciplined enough to do it and don’t really have visibility to performance against our goals until you get a large bill that’s been racked up and you are trying to figure out why. In the end, finding a few easy ways to save money in your monthly budget is as good as finding new ways to make money.

Mint.com is a free financial planning and budget management software application that is simple to use and even easier to maintain which I love. It only takes a few minutes to input all of your account information for banks, credit cards, loans, and investments and that is all you ever need to input. It automatically updates all of your information on the web and keeps track of it for you from that point on which is not uncommon but what I like about it is that it is NOT a bill payment software application so it simply tracks what is in your accounts, how it got there, and where it went. I have had trouble tracking the puts and takes with other software that also did bill pay because of money essentially moving between accounts to pay bills etc, but not with Mint.com. Another aspect of Mint.com that I love is that it provides a lot of different graphical views of information about your spending habits and finances, slicing it and dicing it to give you different perspectives on what you spend your money on. It will look at your average spending by category and will even help you set budget amounts with a few clicks and then track you against those goals. There is nothing like seeing a graph that shows you spending $300 a year in ATM fees and $187 a month at Starbucks to get you thinking about how you could be more responsible financially and save money without a total lifestyle change. You can even have it dig a little deeper into expenses and break it out by category, store, and divide into types of subcategories if you so choose by adding a few easy clickable tags to purchases so it can file it away.

It has other features as well like providing alerts in email that tell you when you are approaching a credit limit or when it sees unusual spending activity on a certain account based on the information you have provided and what it detects in your patterns so that you can take a quick look to make sure everything is alright. It also compares your spending habits collectively and individually against the U.S. average so you can see how you stack up spending your money. Although it’s not really actionable it is helpful from a stop and think about it perspective, especially in this rough economy.

One of the coolest features of Mint.com though is that it constantly analyzes your accounts and will let you know based on your behavior if there is a better account type and program available that you should apply for. It will identify the opportunity and then show you a projected savings based on this change. It may suggest transferring balances to a new credit card with a lower interest rate or intro finance period that saves you hundreds of dollars a month or it may recommend that based on the amount of money you spend on gas each month that you apply for a special gas card that pays you back and will then tell you how much you will save doing it. Their website boasts an average savings of $1000 per account after the first time setup. That ain’t bad! It also keeps track of the best checking accounts and mortgages for you as well and will make recommendations on those just as easily. If you have a specific goal like collecting airline miles or Marriott points you can input that information into Mint.com as well so it will take that into consideration when recommending you modify your spending behavior or accounts.

From an investment perspective Mint.com tracks all of your investments and costs and aggregates it into your total net worth and tracks your overall portfolio performance across all accounts which is a nice feature since I hate logging into all of my different investment accounts.

Mint.com uses bank level security and doesn’t provide any capability to move money from your accounts and they don’t require any personal information such as SSN or name and address when you set up your account. However, they do require you to provide your account login credentials so that it can automatically download your activity and be input into your Mint.com account for tracking and analysis. So theoretically there is risk involved from that perspective but if you read their security policies, technology, and standards it’s as good as it gets on the web.

I personally love the site and have taken advantage of some of the recommendations to save money by switching accounts and changing my spending patterns so Mint.com is working for me. It’s definitely worth taking a look at and spending the few minutes necessary to get it up and running for you as well if you are in the market for an easy to use financial planning software tool or are just interested in statistics and graphical views of your financials.

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