Let me preface by saying that most of my friends and family think I’m crazy.  Partly because I spend almost every waking moment with my fingers on, or in close proximity to, the home-row keys; partly because I quit a nice job about a year ago to start a web technology company (did I mention my degree is in Mechanical Engineering?); and partly because I sign up for and use all these new-fangled, never-heard-of, web-based services that sometimes I even have a hard time explaining what they are or why they are useful.

With that frame of reference, it’s easy to understand why some of my friends think I’m crazy for using Mint.com.  It’s a web-based personal finance company that leverages a slurry of leading edge web technologies to deliver a rich and more convenient money management experience.

To take advantage of this convenience, you must trust Mint.com enough to give them your account information for every financial service you want them to track.  And, if you want the complete, unfiltered experience, this means you give them the lock and key to your entire financial kingdom.

Scary, huh?  Well, a lot of my friends and family think so.  But, that’s why there’s people like me – risking life and limb to try out these new services, getting our hands dirty, getting stung so you don’t have to, jumping through… well, you get the point.

A lot of these services I use I don’t speak very highly of to people that ask me about them, or worse I don’t care enough to talk about them at all.  After a few months of using Mint.com, I felt compelled enough about the service to say: use it.

If you’re worried about reputability, here’s a couple of items that might or might not help:

1. They won the TechCrunch 50 last year.
2. Some schmucks thought enough of them to give them $17 mil in financing.
3. They have a partnership with the Motley Fool.
4. They can connect to a bajillion banks – you don’t get that kind of access for long if you’re shady or insecure.

If you can get past the giving-out-your-information part, here’s why the service is great:

1. All your finances in one place.  This is huge for me.  I don’t want to spend 30 minutes logging into different online bank accounts, opening different tabs, remembering passwords, doing math to calculate net worth.  Your Mint.com account has all this information behind one account log-in and it’s presented clearly and succinctly, which brings me to…
2. 99.9% of online bank user interfaces suck. Either because they muck up the interface trying to hawk you their fee-based services, or they just don’t understand usability, most online bank interfaces suck.  They are slow, repetitious, and useful information is usually deeply nested in the slowness and repetitiousness!  Mint’s UI takes advantage of a lot of newer web technologies.  AJAX for live updates to the account, healthy use of javascript for sortable tables and tabbed panels, Flex/Flash for interactive graphing, etc.
3. The better interface translates to a better understanding of your situation. In my opinion, this makes a big difference in your financial responsibility.  A lot of people I know don’t know what their complete financial situation just because they are too lazy to put all the pieces together!  I know I’ve started checking and understanding my finances more often just because it’s so damn easy.  Previously, I would log into my different accounts and update this amazingly crafted spreadsheet that would crunch numbers and spit out graphs.  It worked great except for the whole me-having-to-update-it part.  I did it maybe once a week?  When it’s all done for you like on Mint you just plain use it more – it’s that simple.
4. They can connect to so many damn banks.  And it’s all done behind the scenes.  A couple of other services I used relied on these browser plugins that were clunky, recorded your actions, and didn’t work half the time.  I don’t know enough about Mint to understand how they are tapping into all these banks – do they have deals cut with some of them?  Do they have pre-recorded scripts for all these banks?  I don’t know and honestly I don’t care that much – it just works.
5. Not just banks, investments and loans too.  I’ve set up my IRA and Car loans on Mint as well.  Great way to track something daily that I usually only tracked once a month if I was lucky.  It’s also great to have these long-term finances available because they go into calculting your net worth.  Do most people really know their net worth, not just what’s in their checking account?  I submit that most people don’t but they probably should.
6. Categorizing transactions is a breeze.  This also goes a long way towards increasing a person’s financial responsibility.  If you can put your transactions into accurate buckets, it’s dead simple to identify where you’re spending too much or where you can trim the fat.  Now, actually taking action is the hard part.

There are some things that can be improved:

1. When you log into your account, Mint begins the fetching of data.  While much more streamlined than other services, it’s still a pain to sit there and wait while a rotating ‘wait please’ graphic  bores into your soul, scraping an almost unnoticable chunk of your sanity from your psyche every second.  Or is that just me?  Most people I know check their finances at the same times every day.  If there were a way to tell Mint to fetch the data at a given time during the day so it’s immediately available, that would be great.  If this already exists, it needs to be more prominent!
2. One of the primary graphs on the account page is your ‘budget’ bar graph.  Mint presents a bar for each of about 5 or 6 categories of transactions for the current month.  These represent what percentage of your budget for those categories you’ve spent so far this month.  There’s also a ‘total budget’ bar at the bottom that’s just the sum of all the categories. This is a nice feature and somewhat useful, but some of the categories don’t fit into this model very well and throw off the usefulness of the total.  For instance, most of my Utilities come all at once – at the end of the month.  So, until the last day of the month my ‘total budget’ is in the green – I’m doing great!  Then, when the utilities hit, my total expenses jump up sometimes well over the budget for that month.  This negates some of the usefulness of the chart as a steady gauge of expenses.  I don’t know the solution to this problem.
3. Also, Mint.com makes money by giving you ‘Ways to Save’.  These are simply offers from financial institutions that pay Mint to present these to you.  I have no problem with this business model, and more power to it.  But, they definitely need to work on the content of the ‘Ways to Save’.  Most of these extend reality by saying that because I’ll get double the rewards points for every milk purchase if I switch to X service that I’ll save Y amount of dollars.  Oh, and by the way the new interest rate on X service is a lot more than your current one, but we’ll just forget to use that in our calculation.  Come on.  Give me something real to work with.  This may improve over time as more financial institutions start presenting real offers.

Bottom line though, if you’re looking to give yourself a kick in the ass in the financial responsibilty department, definitely check out Mint.com.  It’s a well thought out, well implemented, and well polished service.