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The unique website today is one that will help you track your expenses, create and stick to a household budget, automatically download and enter your credit card charges, along with many more nice features. The unique website I am reviewing today is Mint (refreshing money management). At Mint you can have all of your information in once central location and the really nice thing about it is you can access it from anywhere in the world.

Mint is fresh, intelligent online money management. Not only is Mint free, it saves you money. While existing personal finance software packages require hours to set up, a passion for accounting (is that possible?) and hours of weekly maintenance, Mint is virtually effortless.

With Mint, you can achieve better online financial management in less than five minutes. After that, revolutionary, patent–pending Mint money management software does the rest, with virtually no more work required. It automatically pulls together your bank, credit union and credit card data, and provides up–to–date and amazingly accurate views of your financial—life from the big picture to specific details, in a friendly and intuitive way.

In addition, Mint goes beyond visibility and analysis providing personalized money–saving and money–making suggestions. Mint provides users an average of $1,000 in savings opportunities during their first session. Plus, Mint is proactive—alerting you when you are exceeding your personal budget, have a low balance, need to pay a bill, and more.

Mint is safe and secure online money management: we never know your identity and we provide bank–level data security.

The last paragraph is the one that concerns me about any website offering to keep my financial data online. That is security. On the surface it appears that Mint has this covered. Reading from their security page they say.

We ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but we do not see or store that information

I don’t know how they will repeatedly access my bank and credit card accounts if they do not store this information. Mint also makes sure you the user knows you cannot move money with Mint. The service is a read only service.

Am I worried … well in a nutshell yes. However, after doing extensive research on the company I have to say they are impressive. They have several big financial backers including, Benchmark Capital, Shasta’s Ventures, and First Round Capital. They have a board of directors and a executive team members listed on their website. Am I still worried, well I have signed up for an account with them but have not entered my account details as of yet. I really do think I will lay down MS Money for this service though.

How it works

For this section I will defer to the Mint Website:

Mint is a modern, powerful, easy and secure Web–based solution for online financial management. And it’s free. You register anonymously using any valid email address, and then add the log–in information for the online bank, credit union, credit card and investment accounts you want to consolidate in Mint.

Mint connects to more than 5,000 US financial institutions. Your account information is updated daily. Mint automatically categorizes all your purchases, showing you how much you spend on gas, groceries, parking, rent, restaurants, DVD rentals and more, with amazing precision. An advanced alerting system highlights any unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills so you’re in constant contact with your money—effortlessly.

Mint goes way beyond just reporting and budget tracking. Using a patent-pending search algorithm, Mint constantly searches through thousands of offers from hundreds of providers to find the best deals on everything from bank accounts to credit cards; cable, phone and Internet plans; and more. Mint’s suggestions are “unique to you” based on your individual spending patterns. For example, if you have $20,000 in a bank account that’s earning no interest, Mint might recommend a high interest rate savings account from ING or HSBC. Acting on that suggestion would give you an extra $900 in interest income over a year.

How they got started

One day in November 2005, while using Quicken to catch up on his personal budgeting, Aaron realized that he was in for an afternoon of tedious accounting-type work: poring over his statements, filling in gaps in entries, and categorizing dozens of purchases. While all he wanted to get to was a simple pie chart breaking down his monthly spending into its major categories.

And when, even after spending a couple of hours trying, Aaron couldn’t get that chart (and he holds masters degrees in computer science and engineering) he started to wonder why there wasn’t a better way to do all of this automatically. So instead of finishing his Quicken update that day, he began thinking about building the capabilities that would become Mint.

In the Press?

Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, PC World, adn Fortune have all identified this company in articles they published.

Summary

Mint has a great idea by offering a free quality money management product online. The website is clean, streamlined and appears secure. If Mint continues to offer this service for free and I see no reason why they would not, Quicken and MS Money had better tread lightly.

While I have not enterned my account information in  Mint yet … well, I am warming up to the idea.

You can check Mint out for yourself at: http://www.mint.com/

As with any Internet company you engage into business with … check them out thoroughly before performing a transaction. Sites such as the Better Business Bureau and Federal Trade Commission can assist you in determining if the company is legitimate or not. Do not conduct business with any web entity unitl you are completely comfortable with their reputation.