Mint Money Management

Have you been wondering where all your money has been going after you've been paid? Are you not sure what percentage of your paycheck goes towards food? Gas? Then maybe you need a program like Mint.

Mint is a web based program that tracks your money in real time. Once you create an account on their website, you enter in your bank and credit card information along with passwords and it downloads all transactions for you and categorizes them. Mint just recently received the TechCrunch40 Top Company award and is seeing a new influx of users.

I have to admit that I'm still a bit leery of entering in my bank information with passwords; especially to a startup company. But if you read Mint's TOU, you will see that the account information is actually handled by Yodlee. Yodlee handles online portfolios for 32 of the top 50 banks in the U.S. Even with another reputable company handling the account information, I'm still uncomfortable releasing all my information. Unless some sort of insurance is given in case of fraud, I probably won't use the site.

Now, for those of you that weren't scared off from the previous paragraph, Mint does look to be a good program for tracking your finances and it is free. It provides you with percentages, graphs and charts for you to easily determine where your money is being spent.

If you are comfortable releasing your bank information to another company, then try out Mint, as it looks to be a very good financial program. If you're not sure about releasing your information, give it time, as Mint might change the way the information is stored or offer some sort of fraud insurance in the future.