Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

While checking out award-winning work, I came across a cool (no pun intended) financial management site: Mint.

Mint is a free service and provides budgeting tools directly tied to all of your bank accounts. Once you set up your accounts, Mint will pull this information every time you log in, and categorize it by expense type. You can even add tags to expenses, like Reimbursable, Tax-related, Vacation, etc., so you can keep your expenses organized. Mint also displays your expenses by percentages in a clickable pie chart that lets you click down to the basic categories and then expand details on what your actual expenses were. This is great because it gives you a visual tool for analyzing how much you're spending on, say Food -- What percentage is on Restaurants, on Groceries or on... (gasp!) Fast Food!

Two other cool features in Mint are the ability to set budget amounts for yourself and see where you are at with expenses (how much you've exceed or are under budget in a given month), and the ability to see how much you spend in a given category compared to others in a selected city. So you can easily figure out if your lifestyle matches the city you're living in, whether another city might better fit your spending lifestyle, or whether-since your neighbors are doing it-you shouldn't feel guilty spending a little more on this or that!

Other features on Mint.com include savings and investment tools, so you can see what you're saving and invest it wisely - all within the same online application. All in all, Mint is a great online tool, especially if you have bank accounts at different banks and want to manage your overall budget in the same place.

Stephanie Jorgl