Mint.com

Last week I posted about my financial goals. This week I'm letting you know my favorite (free!) tool to help me achieve them. It's a website and an app called Mint.com.

Mint.com is a free - did I mention it's free? - web-based personal financial management tool that uses bank-level encryption. It lets you track your bank, credit card, investment, retirement account, and loan balances and transactions all in one spot. You can use it to make budgets and set financial goals that it will keep track of for you. And, like the myfitnesspal app I told you about a couple of weeks ago, it gives you pretty graphs of everything. Have I mentioned that I love graphs? Just look at this lovely user-friendly website (unfortunately this is not me - I do not have nearly this much money):

Picture of mint.com with pie graph of spending by category, list of budgets, etc. 

What I like about this website/app is that you spend a bit of time setting it up, and then it tracks everything automatically from there. I have all of my credit card bills, student loan, car loan, bank accounts, retirement account, etc. on there and it keeps track of it for me. I set up my budget on there and it tracks it automatically using the info from my banks. It breaks down my spending into an easy-to-interpret pie chart so I can see where I'm going over. And it keeps track of my net worth which is pretty damn motivating since I desperately want that number to get to a million. [Laugh now but just you watch because somehow or other I'm going to be a millionaire before I die.]

Mint uses bar charts to help you stick to the budgets you set.

A lot of people are freaked out by using something over the internet to track finances. They're afraid someone will hack into their account and steal all of their money. If you're really worried, you also shouldn't do any online banking or make any purchases online because those are equally unsafe. Here's why I'm not worried:

Intuit, mint.com's owner, provides the same security software for each of the banks. If someone were to hack into my mint.com account, they'd have no access to any funds. To access my funds, they'd need to hack into my bank account and mint.com doesn't help with that since it doesn't provide the info they'd need to do access any account. Further, my bank accounts and credit cards require me to answer secret questions if I log in from an unrecognized computer and they send me an email when that happens even if the question is answered correctly, so I'd know right away about any attempted breach in security. Mint does not have this information, so neither would a hacker. Lastly, I'm fairly broke. Perhaps I'd worry about this stuff if I had a ton of money? If that were the case and I was worried, I'd probably just put the bulk of my savings and investments in places not linked to mint and track them manually so I could continue to use mint to track my credit cards and monthly spending.

Soon? I will be like this man:

Laughing man in suit and glasses holding money.

Dearest blog readers - do any of you use mint.com? Do you use something else instead? Do you have a budget? How are you keeping track of your money?