Mint.com offers a quick glance into your finances

After the new years one of my new goals has been to manage my money better. This has included setting budgets, tracking expenses and where my money goes, my debt, net worth and other things lenders are going to ask me.

I spend a number of months doing a simple one page financial statement once a month, based of the Rich Dad Poor Dad personal finance template. I felt good tracking it more but it was more of a time consuming process rather than an informative look at my finances.

I came across this website called Mint.com which offers many of the things I've been looking for to track my finances and have everything automatically updated. After setting up my account I am now able to view all my account activity in one shot. I can see my spending, my net worth over time, my debts going away (slowly) and quickly see how much cash cash I've got after I set my monthly goals.

So far I've been quite pleased with the program. I'm not a Quicken guy and I don't know the program but I presume its quite similar in structure. Just looks a little more fancy and new age I think.

Where this really comes in handy is doing when I need to update my personal financial statement. By clicking through a few pages I can see where my debts are, my income, my expenses, etc. and I can just quickly transfer them over to my PFS. Rather than spend an hour looking up my different accounts to check them all I've not got them all in place. When I approach a lender I can have multiple PFSs in place showing how my net worth has increased over time, my debt has gone down, and where my expenses are going.

Having been with the free program for 3 weeks now I'm finding I'm very happy with the simplicity and basic snapshots of my finances that I'm getting. Although its not as fast as playing Cash Flow 101 from Rich Dad Poor Dad and updating your PFS there I can see my weekly and monthly growth over time.