It's all about MINT

I recently discovered a new website that I think EVERYONE can benefit from. http://www.mint.com. Sign up, it will literally only take you 3 minutes, and it's free. Halleluia!

I try to keep a good handle on my finances. Mounds of student loans and living in the bay area means that I always need to know what my finances are looking like at any given time, lest I overspend. I update my checkbook pretty frequently, and recently set up an excel spreadsheet to track my expenses in. These worked well enough until MINT entered my life.

You can set up your mint account to pull information from some or all of your accounts. Every time I use my debit card, mint records it. Every time I deposit money into my savings account, mint records it. Heck, mint even lets me know how much debt vs. income I have, and how many days I have until I need to pay my credit card. Any expenses that mint is unable to classify on its own, you can place into a category (e.g. food/dining, personal, healthcare, etc.). Mint has all sorts of graphs and pies to keep track of how much you spend on each of your different purchase (for instance, I realized I'm eating out at Ratto's too much for my own good!).

Every wondered how your spending habits measure up to others? Mint can tell you that, too. You can select any of your spending categories, and a city to compare your expenditures against. Then you can find out how much, say, an average Oaktowner is spending on shopping (way more than me) or paying off loans (waaaaaay less than me). Another great feature about mint is that it can tell you about ways to SAVE money depending on the types of purchases you are making.

And finally, mint.com is just plain cool. It's got a streamlined, easily accesible interface, and it doesn't take a tutorial to figure out how to navigate through its pages.

Try it out! You'll be thanking me (no, I'm not a mint.com spokesperson, I swear).