I’m a personal budget nerd.
I regularly check my online Bank of America account, keep Excel spreadsheets tracking all kinds of various things and use personal budget software to track and record all my receipts, payments and expenses.
Pre-September 2007 I used Quicken as my go-to personal budget software. Using Quicken was painful and tedious but I did it.
During mid-September 2007, Mint launched at TC40 (which I attended since I was as a TC intern at the time) and I immediately signed up for an account after seeing their demo.
What’s Mint? In a nutshell, it’s an online money management service that lets you plugin your bank accounts, credits cards and investment accounts and than automatically tracks, categorizes and trends your spending.
Above: Screenshot grabbed from Crunchbase’s Mint profile.
The great thing about Mint is that its almost completely hands-free outside of minimal re-categorizing of expenses like changing an item from the “Grocery” category to the “Restaurant” category.
I also have my Mint account set-up to send me weekly spending reports via email. And, if Mint finds any weird banks fees or low balances they’ll send me an email, too.
If you hate spending time and effort on your personal budget, or if you don’t have a personal budget (yet) but would like to start one, you should definitely give Mint a holler.
Inevitable privacy and security concerns can be answered here.
Oh yeah, see my video question for readers in the comments.
