All Your Green Blog

We aren't financial advisers, and don't want to be. But a friend referred me to a wicked-cool site that I've been playing with for a couple days... straight. www.Mint.com is a universal budget-management and planning tool that has a lot of the functionality of desktop applications like Quicken, without all the expense, connection configuration, etc. In less than five minutes, you can have just about any account you have with a bank, credit card, or credit union all automatically updating your Mint.

It's all highly intuitive, and a lot less work to keep your records up to date than its desktop app competitors. Oh, and it's free. Yup, free. They pay the bills by showing you offers for debt consolidation and other accounts and the such. For advertisements, they're well-targeted and tastefully displayed. Well worth the free software, to be sure.

So, why am I so excited about this thing? Aside from it being a well-implemented web utility (which I have a soft-spot for, being a web developer), it's the single most convincing argument to end all of my paper statements. I'm nearly paperless as it stands, but I'm very good about forgetting about when which accounts do what and for how much. Email notices are great, but they're out-of-sight out-of-mind. Here, I have the easiest consolidation of all my accounts I've ever seen. What's that mean? Zero need for paper mailings.

And finally, an anecdotal endorsement. A good friend of mine had an account with a smaller niche bank that stated weren't interested in offering a connection to Mint. He's now with another bank. It's that cool.

• www.Mint.com