For those of you who know me, you might remember that I was using the beta of TurboTax ExpensePro to have it organize and analyze how Skunkie ‘n I spend our money. It was a little buggy and not super convenient, but I was still disappointed when they decided to dump the project. The other day I stumbled upon a couple of free web apps that do the same thing…

The first one I tried was Wesabe. I liked the idea, but I wanted something that would automatically sync with all of my financial accounts without me having to remember. While looking for a way to automate the syncing process with Wesabe, I discovered an even more powerful site called Mint.com. Mint was so easy to set up it was almost funny. After about 2 clicks I entered my username/password for my bank and it found all 3 of my accounts, it synced, that was it. I added my credit card accounts and looked around the site. It’s sort of like Google Analytics for financial information. It showed me where I was spending my money, compared it with national/local averages, showed me where I could save some money by switching companies, let me set budgets and have it email/SMS my phone if I went over… For the first time ever I actually feel like I can understand my entire financial situation without any guesswork, signing into 5 different sites or even worse, calculations. If for some reason I decide not to use Mint, I can delete my entire account with a couple of clicks and *poof* I’m gone.

One thing to note was that a small percentage of purchases we make were un-categorized. I figured that I should categorize them so Mint could properly keep track of my budget and spending… About 5-10 minutes later I had setup all the rules needed to categorize everything I buy. I’m assuming that the default categories were figured out from other users categorizing the same stores, so I may have inadvertently contributed my categorizing skills. As a side note, we apparently spend more than the average person on electronics, and less on most everything else… Big surprise :)

I can think of so many friends and family that would greatly benefit from using this free service that I figured it would be easier to post here then tell each of them. Maybe I’m just the last person to find Mint because they already track around $17billion dollars, but hopefully someone will find this post useful and go try it out. *nudge*