Mint

Mint does what most people hate to do manage their money intelligently and that too free of cost. It saves people from spending hundreds of dollars on hiring finance professionals to understand where they spent their money and the hours one spends wondering where all the hard-earned money disappeared. Once a person sets up his or her Mint account, the site collates their bank account data and credit card data, processes it, and displays the financial state in an intuitive and easy-to-understand manner. What's more is that Mint does not just provide the user with the vanilla savings and spending balance sheet; it gives them excellent insights on how to manage their money. Furthermore, Mint not only advises its users on how to save their money but also tells them how to be smart investors and make more money. In fact, during their first session itself, Mint users are provided savings opportunities of at least $1000. Being a proactive website, Mint alerts its users when they go overbudget, have to pay a certain bill, have little money left in their accounts, and so on. All this with the guarantee of anonymity. Mint provides its users bank-level security and hence is absolutely safe and secure. Aaron Patzer, former architect and technical lead of Nascentric, came up with the idea of a personal finance management system that would be user friendly. He wanted a system that even people from a nonaccounting, nonfinance background could use easily and save themselves from hours of getting caught in a web of credits and debits. Hence, Aaron came up with Mint. He brought together the wonders of the World Wide Web and the mind-numbing financial theories and accounting formulas, and the result was the modern, easy-to-use, powerful, and secure web-based personal finance solution Mint. Today, Mint connects its users to more than 5000 US financial institutions. This online financial management system updates user account information on a day-to-day basis. It just does not list out the user's expenses and other financial details in a chronological order, Mint goes a step ahead. It categorizes the user's expenses and highlight spending patterns. Mint also uses a patent-pending algorithm to search through a large number offers from a variety of vendors to check whether its user is making use of the best offer for him/her. This search is customized to each user according to his/her spending patterns and helps mint provide valuable suggestions on how its user can save his hard-earned money. After all, a penny saved is a penny earned. Mint sees the wisdom in this philosophy and puts into practice what this philosophy preaches. The feature that most distinguishes Mint from other online personal finance solutions is its ease of use. All one needs to do is enter his/her bank account and credit card details, and Mint synchronizes his/her credits and debits every night. So, while a Mint user is sleeping, Mint works to keep his/her personal finances in shape. All it takes is five minutes of a user's time to set up his/her Mint account. This is in contrast to the other financial software packages available in the market. These packages require hours to set up the application and then a further set of hours for weekly maintenance. Yes, they do eat up on a person's precious family time. However, Mint requires none of those hours. Only the five minutes initially spent on setting up the account is all the time Mint requires from its users. It is definitely the easiest and the most intelligent, hassle-free, and efficient online personal financial management system available. Moreover, Mint offers these smart financial management systems for free whereas its competitors put a big dent into a person's pockets for their services. Just as its name suggests, Mint has a very refreshing feel to it. The color combination of green and white is very soothing to the eye. The font is very neat and all information is very well organized. Mint displays a user's personal finance information and its advice in a very intuitive manner. As a Mint user, a person will never have to spend his/her valuable time looking for the details he/she wants to see. The graphs and bar charts use the color gray predominantly, which goes very well with the rest of the color scheme. Unlike the registration process of the other personal finance management solutions, the registration process of Mint is extremely simple and easy to follow. As the first step, all that the prospective user needs to enter is his/her email address, a password for his/her new Mint account, and his/her zip code. This is all the information that is required to set up a Mint account. Then, to let Mint take care of one's daily accounts and provide sound, customized financial advice, one needs to enter his/her bank account and credit card details. Rest assured, Mint keeps all its user's personal information away from prying eyes and provides its user a secure way to manage his/her personal finance. Mint is free for all its users. Now, one may wonder where all the money to support this wonderful online system comes from. Well, Mint has been able to attract almost 20 million US dollars from a variety of venture capitals, and every day there are more companies who wish to show their support for Mint by providing finance. If you are tired of keeping tabs on your money and tallying the debits and credits, Mint is a wise option for you. Try Mint once and you will wonder how you ever managed your finances without it.