Welcome to this week's Tuesday Timesavers, a weekly feature where we talk about things that help busy moms like you save time every day!
This week's featured timesaver is Mint.com. I've been seeing tweets about this service show up on my Twitter feed over the past week and decided to check it out.
Mint.com is an online financial management service much like Microsoft Money or Quicken, except that it is free and done completely online. The process of creating an account is quick, easy, and completely painless. Simply enter your email address and password, and then follow the prompts to add your bank account, loan account, savings account, credit card accounts, and any other financial accounts that you have to Mint.com. It automatically downloads the account details to your Mint.com account.
After doing this, it automatically categorizes your spending (with relatively high accuracy - I had to go back and change a few things, like my daughter's daycare I had to change from "Education" to "Kids - Babysitter & Daycare") and helps plan a budget for you. With just a few clicks, you have have a complete analysis of your financial standing and net worth. You can even add the value of your cars and your house to complete the picture.
And if that's not enough, once you've added a credit or loan account to Mint.com, they send you email reminders letting you know when your next payment is due. These reminders are also posted in an "alerts" section when you're signed into Mint.com.
Finally, the site is secure. Security is verified by Verisign, Trust-e and McAfee, so you know your information is safe.
The only complications I ran into are with credit cards that have extra layers of security. For example, one of my credit card accounts requires that you enter your password and answer three security questions every time you sign in. That one I wasn't able to add to my Mint.com account, but it's set up to auto-pay anyway so it's not really a concern.
There's about a million more cool features on Mint.com, but why not check it out for yourself?
In the interest of transparency - the opinion expressed here is mine and mine alone - I was not compensated by Mint.com in any way for writing this review.
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