If you use the Web to pay your bills, manage your bank accounts, buy and sell stock, or check your credit cards, you probably spend a lot of time logging into each site to check the status of your accounts. For the last several months I've been using a free service called Mint* that consolidates all my financial information in one place.

Not only does Mint give me an at-a-glance update of all my spending and saving activity, it has a host of other nifty features that makes it worth checking out. For instance, the overview page gives me a snapshot of all my cash holdings and all my debts, so I can see how much in the black (or, more likely, in the red) I'm in. It also gives me a list of alert items, such as credit card payment dates, unusual spending events, and budget overruns (these alerts can also be sent by email or text message, which has already saved me from having to paying a late fee on my credit card).

Because I have signed up for online checking with my bank, Mint has access to my checking account transactions, and it does a pretty good job of categorizing my debit card expenditures, based on the name of the stores the purchases were made. Occasionally I'll have to go in and correct a faulty assumption (Mint categorizes purchases made at Lucky, the clothing store, as ones made at Lucky, the supermarket) but once you teach it how to handle something, it won't forget. The budget tracking and spending trend reports Mint offers are excellent. You can even compare your spending habits with those of other Mint users in different cities.

Mint also analyzes my spending habits, credit card interest rates, and other data and comes up with suggestions to save money, like switching to a credit card with a lower interest rate or a checking account with a higher interest rate.

You might be asking yourself "Is it safe to give this company access to all my financial information?" That's a very good question, and I strongly recommend that you visit www.mint.com/privacy to learn how Mint protects your data before making a decision whether or not to use the service.

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