Online Financial Management
May 20, 2008
Online financial management has been taken to the next level by the online site Mint.com. Mint allows registered users to consolidate all their banking, credit card, brokerage, and mutual fund information on one platform with a wealth of management and comparision tools. Mint connects to over 5,000 US banks and credit unions, credit card, brokerage, and mutual fund companies to keeping transactions and account balances automatically updated. Mint has bank-level data security and according to their site its security and privacy have been validated by VeriSign and TRUSTe. Mint offers artificial intelligence to categorize expenses and compare your spending habits by category or even to other geographic locations.
Another interesting feature of the Mint site is the ability for Mint to provide offers based on spending and savings habits of their users. While this is most likely the best source of revenue for Mint, it does appear that the offers promoted are relevant and timely perhaps even more so than a basic search on Google and Yahoo with their paid-search results displayed before their algorithm-based search results.
Mint Financial Alerts
Registered users at Mint can opt-in for regular e-mails for the following notifications:
- Low balances in any checking or savings account
- Credit card bill due dates
- Low credit on credit cards
- Over your budget on any selected category
- High or unusual spending based on your history
- Bank/ATM fees and finance charges
- Large purchases
- Large deposits, like a paycheck
- High or unusual spending by category based on your history
One final note about Mint and their service....
It's free.
