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 has just gone around our facebook wall at Millions of Us. Powerful prose indeed. Worth sharing with the world.

Sometimes we need to be reminded of where all this fun with the web really started. 60 years. wow.

The team over here at Millions of Us put together the following tutorial video to help people navigate the new gossip mobile game and heads up display.

C

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Today we are launching Phase II of Gossip Girl in Second Life: The Gossip mobile! The Gossip mobile is a heads up display (a kind of in-world information pop-up) which allows you to see the style, coolness rating and status of the people around you. More to the point, you can see what people are saying about others. I have to admit, after spending less than thirty seconds with the device at the recent Electrolux party I was completely hooked on using it.

The really cool thing here is, when I ran into someone at the party I didn’t know, and they had tons of style and cool points, I knew this was someone who was respected as a maven. Someone to keep an eye on and listen to carefully. Of course Celebrity already had what appeared to be max ratings across the board. No surprise there.
Now, if only I could see what people were saying about me!

Get your mobile device here.
C

Hi, I’m a Chris’ random blog post. You may remember me from such blogs as “Gone Global…” and “Reuters: Scion 2008 Lineup Revealed in Chicago & Second Life”.

Alright, so what’s today’s random post going to be about? In my voracious appetite to consume all things social media I sometimes come across things that surprise me about the power of social media. Today’s example is a blog post about our job opening for a VP of Production. Obviously, the blog is all about job positions, but how cool is it that we made it to the point that our jobs get posted alongside Omidyar Network postings. Who by the way, are one of the principle investors in Linden Lab. Small world.

So how did Paul, the author of above blog, get our post? Probably via LinkedIn. It’s really interesting to see how connections develop within this social network. I think there are basically two methods people use. The first is the close network method. The basic logic runs like this: I’m only going to connect with people which I have very close relationships who I trust highly. These people than become highly valuable when your trying to connect to one of their contacts, because you know that if they recommend you, chances are high their recommendation will be followed. In other words,¬† f your trying to sell something, looks for these type of connectors.

The second type are the broad connectors. Those people who will try to create connections as promiscuous as possible. These people are going to be very useful when it comes to selling a service via their contact list, but they will be very valuable if you are trying to tell people about a VP Production job you are trying to fill. Which brings us back to where we started: Small world.
PS: Feel free to connect with me via LinkedIn

PPS: Bonus points to those who guess which type of connector I am.