Mint: Track Expenses, Budget Your Money with Virtually No Bookkeeping!

Would you like to know how much you're spending, available to you on a daily basis, without keeping books? Want to start saving but don't know how to budget? Mint will teach you, and let you know if you've exceeded your budget via email or text message. In fact, Mint will let you know all these things without you ever making a bookkeeping entry.

This web-based application allows you to enroll in about 5 minutes. You don't have to give your name, social security # or address, and money can't be transferred within mint. You give it your banking #'s, your credit card accounts, and Mint downloads daily your transactions. It will notify you of a change in interest rate and notify you of purchases above a limit set by you to guard against fraud.

Mint has graphs that show your expenditures, comparison graphs and sends you an email report weekly that shows all your activity. The automatic expense categories are customizable. The blog is full of money-saving tips and advice for getting out of debt.

The downside of Mint could be that your spending habits are being tracked for later marketing, but I think it's a small price to pay for the convenience of gathering this information without entry time. Check it out at http://www.mint.com, read the fine print, and see if this program is for you!