Minty Goodness

No, I'm not talking about a yummy new dessert (although I wish I was), but I'm about to tell you about a wonderful free financing program. I promised my friend Jean that I would try to blog regularly about some of my favorite apps and I thought I would start off with the best one of all.

This app is called Mint and I'm sure it's available for both the iPhone and Andriod phones. But wait, even if you don't have a smart phone you can still use this amazing, and totally free, utility. I still can't believe that this thing is free!

If you ever used Quicken or Quickbooks to keep track of your financial life you're probably like me and wait several months to log all of your transactions. OK, who am I kidding? I wait an ENTIRE year to log everything and I try like crazy to remember exactly what it was I bought on Amazon 9 months earlier. I end up making stuff up so my year-end reports are nothing more than a bunch of educated guesses as to where all our money went. I mean who has time to sit at the computer with all the credit card bills, bank statements, and receipts and track all this stuff?

But now, with this super handy app and online program, you can set up all your accounts via their secure server. Just go to www.mint.com and set up your free account. Once you plug in your banking information, credit cards, and whatever other financial things you want to track, it compiles reports, charts, budgets . . . every imaginable piece of information regarding your finances. When you make a purchase at say Big Y it's smart enough to categorize the expense as groceries. When you make a charge at say Mobile it automatically categories the expense as fuel. 85% of all my spending gets categorized automatically and the rest of the assignments can be made either from my phone or (here's the best part) any computer hooked to the internet. All you need to do is login to their website and what was once only available to you on your one computer with Quicken loaded is now anywhere you need it to be. I log in at least once a week from various computers and make sure I have everything up to date. No more trying to remember what the heck I bought at Walmart 6 months ago.

If you want, you can set up budgets for certain categories. For instance you can set a "clothing" budget for xx amount of dollars and when and if you go over that budget, you will get an email alert telling you it's time to stop buying clothes. Or in my case, it might be time to stop feeding the dogs because we seem to go over budget on our 'Pet care' every month. There are tips on how to save money and you can also set savings goals. There are just so many cool features that you need to go and check it out.

Mint is owned by Intuit, which is the maker of either Quicken or Quickbooks so it's a reputable company that I trust. Why they are providing this for free, I do not know. Perhaps that will change down the road, but even if they start to charge for this service, it will be money well spent.