Tonight I felt like showcasing a truly awesome website that I think everyone should take a look at.
Mint.com
Mint.com is a free and robust Web application that allows users to automatically track and analyze their financial transactions, set budgets, and even send balance updates in text messages to cell phones.
Mint is fresh, intelligent online money management. Not only is Mint free, it saves you money. While existing personal finance software packages require hours to set up, a passion for accounting (is that possible?) and hours of weekly maintenance, Mint is virtually effortless.
Along with it’s clean aesthetic appearance and it’s smooth flash/JavaScript usage, you can create your own categories and rename transactions as you see fit (without affecting your banking records). They use banking-level data security on our site and have independent verification by Verisign, Hackersafe, TrustE. They use all the right encryption; and they have in-house expertise.
When you’re on Mint, you’re anonymous. Theynever ask for your name, address, or social security number. All we want is an email, a username, and a password.
When you enter your banking username and password, they make a one-time, read-only connection to your bank that verifies your account and pulls in balances and transaction descriptions. They don’t keep your account number or your name. Instead, they’ve partnered with a company called Yodlee, a kind of back-end banking infrastructure service that’s used by Microsoft Money, Fidelity and lots of other top-10 financial institutions. After their first verification, they act as an intermediary and pull the financial information, and they, in turn, pull it from Yodlee.
In other words, they don’t know your private information. That eliminates the risk of identity theft or fraud.
I can give you complete access to my Mint account, and there’s nothing you could do with it. You can’t change my accounts, you can’t steal my identity. Because of all the independent verification, security hasn’t prevented people from signing up.
I personally keep track of my multiple Wells Fargo checking accounts, credit cards, loans through them as well as my Shell card, my 401k and even my Express Fashion card.
It truly is a great service, and I would recommend it to anyone.
Check it out at http://www.mint.com