Whew, I did it. For the last few weeks I've been participating in a private beta test of a new financial web service called mint. Part of the agreement was that I would refrain from talking, blogging, or basically intimating that I knew what Mint was, what it did, or that it even existed. Luckily I managed to keep my trap shut, as the service launched today at TechCrunch40. So the embargo is off!
Mint is a swank little app that collects spending reports from your various online finance resources. So it compiles spending reports from all your credit cards and whatever bank accounts you supply. (Yeah, its a little creepy giving them all that information but once you get past that its cool. Plus I realized all you can do in my online credit card accounts is pay bills, so what the hell.)
Once you jump in Mint collects all your transactions and starts classifying them into spending groups. It doesn't get them all right off the bat, but its pretty good about recognizing most merchants. From there you can see the breakdown of where your money goes on a month to month scale, and compare your current spending with your average spending in each group.
Overall I think its pretty useful as a little introspection of where you're throwing your money. The last section of the site analyzes your interest rates, cash back and other rewards to recommend ways you could save money. This could use a little work cause it kept recommending I switch one card that I hardly use to a cash back card that I do use. So if you'd like a little clarity in your burning pocket syndrome go check it out, its open to the public.
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