Do you suck at budgeting your money? Want to make it easier? Do you not mind sharing your online banking and credit card passwords with a third party? Then this app is for you.

Budgeting App: Mint.com

WOH! Hold on! Did I just say that you’ll have to share your online financial passwords with a 3rd party? Yes I did. And if you’re not okay with that, then stop reading now because you will not want to use this app. To get the full benefits out of it, you’ll have give Mint.com your passwords so that they can download your expenses and balances. If that’s okay with you, read on because this app is the best budgeting software you’ll ever use.

Mint.com is the self described: “…best free way to manage you’re money.” I agree with this. Once you set it up (by giving them the passwords to your bank and credit card accounts), Mint will automatically download all of your expenses, withdrawals, deposits, transfers, fees, and everything else that affects your accounts. In addition, it will email you about upcoming payments due (like your upcoming credit card bill), tell you when the devil (aka: Chase Bank) hits you with some kind of bogus fee, and will alert you when you’ve gone over budget for specific kind of expenses. This last little bit brings out the real power of Mint.com.

Before we talk about these alerts, we need to examine the basics of how Mint.com tracks your expenses. For optimal results, you’ll want to use your debit or credit card for all purchases. If you do that, Mint can track where you spent your money. On top of that, Mint has a lot of information about various places so about 90% of the time it can correctly categorize your expense. For example, if I stop at a BP or go to the grocery store, Mint knows that I bought gas or groceries, respectively. If they do miscatagorize an expense (or don’t have the store in their database), you can manually enter what the expense was for.

Now that you have Mint tracking your expenses, you can log in to Mint and set thresholds for different expenses and Mint will alert you when you go over an expense. Time for another example: If you set your eating out threshold at $200 for the month, Mint will let you know the instant you go over that amount. The same goes for groceries, gas, clothes, coffee, or anything else you spend your money on. In this way, you don’t really have to spend a lot of time on your budget. You simply spend a couple of hours up front telling Mint what you want your thresholds to be, another couple of hours a month double checking Mint’s categorizing, and you will have a much easier time keeping to a budget.

Setting your budgets can only be done online but everything else can be done online or through the iPhone app. However, updating expense categories is a bit tedious using the app. In all honesty, the best thing about the app is viewing your expenses, incomes, and the alerts. It’s good for letting you know that you’ve over spent on things or just to review how much money you have in your accounts when you’re on the go. Great for impressing the girls at the bar, or, as I find to be more often the case, letting you know that it’s worth hunting down a cash machine for that last $20 dollars you have in your account.

iPhone App Notes

• Name: Mint
• Cost: Free
• Time to Learn: A couple of hours
• Addictiveness: Low
• Overall Rating: 4/5