deletedItems: Life, Love and the Pursuit of Zombies.

Organizing your finances and building your budget is a necessary evil these days. Plenty of plastic, e-commerce, online bill pay and a significant reduction in the amount of cash people carry makes it increasingly difficult to maintain an up-to-date view of your financial status at any given time. Online banking makes it easier to view recent transactions, but keeping track of more than one financial account requires you to login to each financial institution's web-site, track your spending and payments, then gather all that information back into one central location. Budget Tracker has long been a favorite of mine in the category of budgeting software. Other options include using Microsoft Money, Quicken or a similar program; many people choose to keep a written record or use a spreadsheet program to track their finances. The less motivated among us (I've been there, trust me), barely keep track of anything at all, leaving their financial health to chance. The problem with this is that one can easily over-spend and accrue debt, racking up over-draft and late fees. I've seen more life and relationship problems caused by poor money management than anything else. 

Buzzing on the web lately is a new financial account management site, Mint. I hadn't paid much attention to Mint until recently, when I read a couple articles about it. Intrigued, I went to the site and set up a Mint account. The first thing Mint does after registering a new account is ask you for your bank/credit card online banking information. I double-checked to verify that they have security measures in place to prevent my information from being misused, then proceeded to enter the information about my main bank account. I was pleased to see that they did not require any account number information, but rather, used the back-end system to access my bank.

Within about 45 seconds, Mint had downloaded information about my two bank accounts, and all the transaction information for the last 45 days or so. It even categorized about 70% of my transactions, allowing me to view my spending in a manner of ways.

You can track your spending via a pie chart:

You can see if you are spending more than usual:

These are just a couple of the awesome features of Mint. For supported banks, they will let you know if you can save money by switching to another bank, tell you exactly where you are overspending, and even send you a text message if you get to close to a spending limit.

I am test driving Mint with four accounts at the moment, we will see how it goes!