There are many financial monitoring tools out there but there is one that I am very fond of and wanted to share my experience. Mint.com is a free online financial management tool that can sync with a large number of financial institutions. For instance I am able to sync my bank account, savings account, credit cards, school loans, brokerage accounts, and retirement accounts(401k or Roth IRA). This all updates the amounts when you login to show you your current balances. It will also show your monthly cash flow, usage, and net assets. The one thing I really like about this site is that after you log your information into the site, you can’t retrieve it so in the event your account gets stolen, you won’t lose all of that private information.

      On top of being able to view all of your balances, it will also show your spending habits and group them into sections such as food, travel, rent, etc.. Based off of this information you can setup a budget and have mint send you an e-mail if you get near this budget. Mint will pull your transaction data and also graph trends for you to see how you spend your money or where you spend the most money at so that you can cut costs. The site will also warn you if your balances are getting low in your checking account or if you are reaching your credit limit. A really cool feature is its ability to help you save money although it is not 100% accurate. For instance, it will recommend credit cards to lower your monthly interest payments or other brokers for investment accounts, however it doesn’t take into account how little I make trades and claims I will save over $4000 if I switch.

      Now with any application there are some flaws, I will start with the accounts. Not all accounts are supported and sometimes an institution will not allow or cause issues for mint to connect to them. An example would be ING Direct bank accounts, it would sometimes take multiple tries to gather the balance information. Other large institutions such as Wells Fargo worked great. Another flaw was the speed of the update, since I have a large number of accounts (about 13) it takes a while to update, so I usually log in then go get some coffee. The last issue I have is that when I move money from my checking account to an investment account, it will record it as spending even though I really am not spending it that way.

     Other than the small flaws I think this is still a great tool and is much easier to see the big picture with Mint. I recommend using this web application to manage your finances.