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FollowWhy I Stopped Being Paranoid and Started Using Mint
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The idea of giving anyone my online banking usernames and passwords sends shivers up my spine. But my finances are more irregular than ever right now, so I've got to keep a close eye on them. For the last seven years, every month I dutifully fired up Microsoft Money (then later, Intuit's Quicken) on my computer to balance my accounts. Now that I'm freelancing, it's either feast or famine in my checking account, and that makes me want to jump off the roof instead of launch Quicken. When several months of personal finance denial went by without doing basic house-cleaning, I bounced a check. It was time to make keeping tabs on my money easier.
Enter Mint.com, a web-based finance aggregator. Given your online banking credentials, Mint logs into your accounts, fetches your transactions and balances for you, and arranges them into a single, well-designed dashboard. Back in October of 2007, Adam gave Mint a rave review on Lifehacker. But in the editors' private chatroom I said I thought it looked great, but that I couldn't bring myself to give it my online banking passwords. Last month, thanks to that bounced check, I finally bit the bullet. I'm glad I did.
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