Dear Mint... How I love thee, let me count the ways...

After finding out about personal finance sites like Mint, Geezeo and Wesebe in their early days, I've been enamored with the concept of using technology to make personal finance easier to grok. While Geezeo and Wesabe (and Cake and Covestor, etc) had some decent features, Mint ultimately took the cake... with the frosting.

Even though I was a little worried when they were bought by Intuit, I'm still a fan. I can't say I contribute to their wealth as I'm pretty smart about my credit cards and cds, so they never have any good deals to offer me. (Mint, take note of BillShrink.com, which is offering a cool find cheapo gas near you feature... which is actually useful for me. Though I'm not sure how they'd make money off of that feature, other than hoping you get a CD or Credit Card through them on an educated whim.)

Anyway, what has me all buzzing about Mint today? Their planning tools that they rolled out a few months ago. They weren't that useful to me online only, but now that I have my shiny new iPhone having the Mint app makes my financial life a thousand times easier and better.

Just tracking my expenses and income per category, and having access to that at all times, is giving me so much more control over my financial life. And it feels good. Minty good.

While this month my expenses have been (scary) more than I'd like, starting in 2010 I'm going to use Mint to carefully BUDGET (like really budget) and account for every little thing I spend. It's so easy to do that because Mint knows. Every once in a while I have to adjust a category or categorize a check, but that's easier than inputing everything by hand. I am so excited to embark on a year of incredible savings and budgeting thanks to my Mint iPhone app and Mint.com (and yes, even (M)intuit.