I’ve tried out a few financial management applications in my day, not limited to MS Excel, MS Money, and Quicken, and I can’t say that I have been in any way impressed with any of those approaches.  They require a lot of work to set up, a lot of work to maintain, and in some cases (here is looking at you, Quicken), just plain don’t work at all..in my seemingly endless quest to get a budget going, I have typically ended up giving up.

That said, it was with both hopeful optimism and well-deserved skepticism that I started playing around with Mint.com a few months ago.  Mint.com is a free online financial management application with the ability to automatically connect to over 5,000 financial institutions to import transactions and help you manage your financial life.  Desperately wanting some solution to make managing my finances easier, I put aside the inherent security concerns of having all of your financial life located on some company’s servers, and dove in.

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