For anyone who has spent more than an hour with me, it becomes pretty clear that I’m obsessive about finances. I’m a faithful reader of Barron’s, The Economist, and Bloomberg.com, to name just a few of the publications I build into my weekly agenda. I follow the movements of the Dow, the S&P , the Dollar, the Euro, and Brent Crude Futures (i.e. Oil), Gold, and all my investments with glee and trepidation both, sometimes simultaneous. At this point, you have only a taste of what it’s like to be with me for any length of time.

So it may come as a surprise to those that know me well that I’m a complete disaster when it comes to tracking my personal finances. I have no idea where I spend my money. This is mostly because I run on a cash-in/cash-out system. I simply stop spending money when cash is low and spend it when cash is high. My only saving grace is that at an early age I happened to come across Robert T. Kiyosaki, author of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” with its single biggest lesson being “pay yourself first”. I’ve always put money away in investments before paying the bills or buying toys.

This however is no way to plan for the future (or taxes, see below). Over the years I’ve tried various pieces of software ranging from Quicken and Microsoft Money to budget spreadsheets in Excel (one in fact developed by my CFO father in-law that is more detailed than anything I’ve ever seen). None of them worked simply because I’m too lazy to input data and keep it up to date.

My lack of financial tracking all comes to a head when tax season hits. I have an extremely painful month as I try to figure out where everything has gone and come up with the money to pay my taxes. Every year I swear I will do something about it…. and I don’t.

Well, this year I did.

After some careful analysis, reading reviews, and research I’ve come across what may be my solution: mint.com. From their own website: “mint is easy, automatic and online money management. Mint.com connects securely with more than 5,000 US financial institutions” - including the ones I use!

Ok, so what does it really do? It converts all my spending from credit card, debit cards, automatic payments, and bill payments into one dynamic stream of data, while also converting finance notes into English text like “GOTBLUEMI8439, Vacaville, CA” to “Got Blue Milk, Photographs.” It gives you your spending trends. It automatically creates budgets based on your personal historical data and alerts you by email when you pass those budgets. In other words it does what I should have been doing all along. And the price is right: Free (it’s add/offer supported)

The catch: You have to give them access to your online financial accounts. This was pretty scary for me. I’ve not done all my accounts yet simply because I’m not willing to give them that much trust and I’ve used an anonymous email address from a generic hosting provider. The upside is that they do address the security issue head on. Plus the financial backers are deep-pocketed VC’s like Benchmark and Shasta. A question I would love to have answered is: do mint’s board members trust mint.com with their financial information?

I’ve only got about a month of data in there, I’m still living cash-in cash-out, but mint.com almost has enough information in there that I may be able to start making better-informed financial decisions. The big test will come next year at tax time when I’m running around looking to pull all my finances together. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Chris' Thoughts (twitter: classonde). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.