Recently, when I wrote a post about Mint.com, – Think Outside The Box : Get A Free Online Financial Guru – I promised to get back to you and report on  my experience using it.

In a nutshell I loved it. And I guess a lot of others do, too, as Mint.com has 250,000 users.  ( No, I don’t own stock in the company although I wish I did.)  Mint.com is the largest and fastest growing personal finance application on the web and I gather, perhaps the most award winning. Mint.com (www.mint.com), , was named by PC World as one of the 100 Best Products of 2008 for its innovative online money management service and has received two Webby awards since their September, 18, 2007 launch,

Fast Company tells us: “the same day Mint went live ,it won $50,000 in the TechCrunch40, a demo derby run by Web impresario Jason Calacanis. Two weeks later, Mint won best in show at Finovate 2007, a personal-finance confab. It also signed up more than 40,000 users in the two weeks after launch.”

Just as aside, in case you’re interested….if you’re not, skip on down to the next paragraph, Mint has the pedigree to die for: the management team includes industry veterans drawn from the ranks of Charles Schwab & Co., eBay, Expedia, Intuit, and PGP . Investors include top venture capital firms and individuals associated with companies including Blue Nile, Google, Intuit, PassMark Security, PayPal, Yahoo! and others. Whoa, that’s a lot of brain power in one room!  But the really important thing for me, and I think for you too, is that Mint.com is easy and useful.

Easy

I think Mint.com is so popular because it’s so easy. After entering your bank and credit card info, ( with Mint using the same 3rd party security that banks and credit card companies use, you never to do anything else except look at the information you want. You never need to import or synch your data as Mint does that for you in real time. It categorizes transactions; provides a unified view of all account activity; alert you to low balances, bank fees, upcoming bills, and even potentially suspicious account activity; and give personalized suggestions for significant savings opportunities.

Useful

Being able to click on one screen and see where you are in all your accounts at a glance is the second reason it’s so popular and the one that completely won me over.

I’m thinking now I may even be able to make a  hard and fast budget in my personal life, and prompted by alerts and items which pop up letting you know where you’re spending the most money…..thank goodness it wasn’t something fluffy and outrageous like Tiffany’s or, on a more modest scale, Starbucks.  My overages, if I were to have completed a budget, are pretty practical: Mint knows that HEB is my grocery store where I also buy things like detergent. ( Also, thank goodness, I haven’t been to the Apple store since I started using Mint.com, and if I ever finally gear up to buy a Kindle electonic reader from Amazon I wonder if that will be classified as “books” or electronic toys?  Perhaps I shouldn’t do the budget until after I get a Kindle.)

What do you think?  Have you used Mint.com yet?  If you have or if you do, please write and tell us about it.