Show Me The Money

Now, I know that many of you readers tend to be conservative by nature and perhaps have never even made a web-purchase for fear of disclosing your credit card information. If this defines you, you may want to skip this edition!

If not, read on ... Mint Dot Com is a free personal finance web application that works with over 3500 financial institutions worldwide. It pulls together all of your credit cards, all of your savings accounts, all of your checking accounts, all in one place.... so you can see exactly what you spend on gas, clothes, sushi (must not forget the sushi), and how many Starbucks double-redeyes you've had this month, etc.

It takes about two-minutes to set up, so it's really easy to use. It sends you bill reminders, low-balance alerts and you can set up a budget so you can more effectively manage your monthly finances. Mint does not store any of your financial account numbers, usernames or passwords. The company partners with Yodlee, a leading provider of online banking services to major banks for over 10 years, to ensure a secure connection to your financial information.

Mint protects your information using bank level data security and 128 bit-bit encryption, verified by Verisign and HackerSafe. Mint is TRUSTe certified to provide industry leading privacy protection and partners with RSA to provide anti-phishing protection. Using Mint does not require any personally identifying information, leaving you as anonymous as you would like to be.

Mint competes directly with the likes of Microsoft Money and the crowd favorite - Quicken. It's much easier to set up and does away with the need to balance your checkbook manually -- it does all of this for you automatically. The main demographic using the free service is in their 20's and because the service is web-based, it's accessible from any location with Internet access. Mint also uses the latest in mobile technologies to enable users to access their accounts via text-messaging (for balance alerts, etc).

In early 2008, Mint promises to also enable us to add-in all of our investment accounts such as stocks, money-market, IRA and mutual fund accounts with the goal of enabling a comprehensive view into our entire portfolio of holdings.

So how, you might ask, does this Web2.0 company who offers a free service plan to make money? By referring you to use the services of sponsoring financial institutions. Let's say that you currently have your money sitting in a low-interest-paying checking account. Mint will detect this and then "suggest" that you move your funds to one of several institutions who are paying a higher rate of interest. If and when you sign up, and move your account, Mint will earn a referral fee from that financial institution.  This "advice" is based on your spending trends and also may include recommendations of new mutual funds, credit cards, etc.  On the surface this sounds good, but I do wonder just how objective the advice will be?

So, that's the scoop this week. Take a look at Mint.com and let me know what you think.