Mint.com – the only thing better would be mint with chocolate!

So, my “accounting” is a mess.  Jeremy gave up on my endless debit transactions awhile back and said “Here – you do it”.  (OK, so he didn’t force it on me… But I think he was about to and I volunteered in the nick of time.)

Even though I’ve done small business accounting jobs for several years, I’m just not that good at my personal stuff.  Quicken was a mess, and I couldn’t get it to download transactions and when it did it was more confusing than ever.

But, after wading through a mess of income and expenses during tax return time, I determined that I had to get stuff in order.

Enter Mint.com

Yesterday Erin blogged about how awesome Mint.com was and I thought it looked interesting.  I’d just spent the previous afternoon fighting with Quicken and had gotten nowhere.

So, I signed up for Mint.com, added my bank account, and… it downloaded all my transactions.

Categorized them.

(Mostly) Correctly.

Let me fix a few mis-categorized items and then tell it to always make that transaction that category.

I was basically organized in 10 minutes.

And then when I saw that it also automatically downloads data from Paypal, well, I was hooked.  The only thing I don’t like so far is that it only downloaded a few months of transactions.  Maybe there’s a setting I’m missing somewhere?

Oh yeah.  It’s free.

Did I mention it was free?

How’s it free?  Their website says “If you act on one of Mint’s personalized savings recommendations, we sometimes — but not always — earn a nominal fee. But you can always count on unbiased advice.”

That’s the exact same way this website works.  It’s the way a lot of the world is starting to work – provide an awesome service for free, and support it by strategic advertising.

What?! Put my financial data online?

I know some people are cautious when it comes to using an online accounting service like Mint.com – and, rightly so.  But, I’ve heard great things about Mint.com and to be honest, while caution is always a good idea, your financial information is floating around everywhere anyway.  You’ve got to be savvy whether or not you’re using Mint.com or not.

If you’re not comfortable with it, don’t do it.  If you find yourself often receiving emails about a bank account or supposed bank account and aren’t sure if they’re real or spam, Mint.com and even online banking probably aren’t a good idea for you.

Do you use Mint.com?

What do you think about Mint.com?  I’d love to hear from more people who have been using it longer than, well, a day!