I don’t know if it’s an addiction,  the challenge, knowing you can bear the pain of the long climb, the exhilaration of success when, against long odds, you know you’ve created something  that didn’t exist before. Maybe it’s a hidden gene, waiting to be discovered.  Maybe it’s just that after entrepreneurship, nothing else seems so satisfying.  But whatever it is, and the x factor is, author Rajesh Setty gets it, to my mind, just right in The Dance of Entrepreneurship:

The Times:  In an article titled Age of Testosterone comes to end in Iceland:

“Iceland, ravaged throughout history by volcanic eruptions and natural catastrophes, is struggling with a man-made disaster so overwhelming that the women are taking over. It is, they say here, the end of the Age of Testosterone.”

Next week a newly minted left-leaning Government led by Johanna Sigurdardottir will start to tackle the tough agenda of cleaning out the old-school-chum networks that have led Iceland to the verge of bankruptcy.
Half of her Cabinet will be women.”

New York Times op-ed: In an piece titled Mistresses of the Universe, Nicholas Kristof posits:

“At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, some of the most interesting discussions revolved around whether we would be in the same mess today if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters.“

What do you think?

Have the guys displayed a little too much testosterone and too little….. what shall we say…brains? balance? reserve?  How about common sense?  I would hazard a guess most women wouldn’t take $1 and bet $30 on it, like most U.S. banks have done, and which got us into this mess to begin with.  Unless they’re addicts.

Oh, I forgot.  You can get addicted to power and greed.  But women, for the most part, aren’t.  So it makes sense to give them a shot at cleaning up this mess the power players have made.

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.

Do you ever spend more than you should?  Let your bank account get too low?  Put off budgeting?  Forget or delay paying off those high interest credit cards? Who doesn’t?

What we could all use is a a financial planner/ manager who will take care of all those myriad money details for us.  But who can afford that?  You can.  We all can.  Because Mint is free.

Mint – Manages Your Money

http://www.mint.com/

“Mint is fresh, intelligent online money management. Not only is Mint free, it saves you money….

With Mint , you can achieve better online financial management in less than five minutes. After that, … Mint money management software does the rest, with virtually no more work required. It automatically pulls together your bank, credit union and credit card data, and provides up–to–date and amazingly accurate views of your financial—life from the big picture to specific details, in a friendly and intuitive way.”

How Does Mint Work ?

Mint connects to more than 5,000 US financial institutions. Your account information is updated daily. Mint automatically categorizes all your purchases, showing you how much you spend on gas, groceries, parking, rent, restaurants, DVD rentals and more, with amazing precision.

Secure: Mint provides bank–level data security and industry–leading identity protection. Its security and privacy have been validated by VeriSign and TRUSTe. Users sign up with nothing more than a valid e-mail address, password, and zip code, then enter login credentials for supported financial institutions. Mint doesn’t store any of these credentials, working instead with Yodlee, a third-party financial aggregation service provider that’s provides similar services for “top” US financial institutions. Mint uses 128-bit SSL encryption to communicate with Yodlee and pull your transaction data. Mint never knows your identity.Their level of security is much the same as Paypal.com, eBay.com, your bank or many of the other online companies to whom you’ve given your financial information.

Mint Is Your Financial Traffic Cop/Watchdog

An advanced alerting system highlights any unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills so you’re in constant contact with your money. Plus, Mint is proactive—alerting you when you are exceeding your personal budget, have a low balance, need to pay a bill, and more.

Mint Is Your Sharp Eyed Accountant Looking for Savings

In addition, Mint goes beyond visibility and analysis providing personalized money–saving and money–making suggestions. Mint provides users an average of $1,000 in savings opportunities during their first session. Mint is constantly working to find you savings. Mint keeps looking for new ways for you to save every day—continuously comparing your needs to product, service and bank offerings most relevant to you. ( Of course, the companies who are making the offers are also financing the program, Mint, so you don’t have to….to you it’s free.  Just bear that in mind when you evaluate the offer.)

Mint is Your Always On, Anywhere/anytime access, Free Financial Planner

These are some of the goals Mint can help you with.

• Pay off credit card debt
• Buy a car
• Pay off student loans
• Save for retirement
• Spend less eating out
• Create a personal budget
• Manage your investments

Perhaps in some ways we all practice a little avoidance ( perhaps even denial) when it comes to our finances.  Do we really want to know how much we spend eating out or whatever our personal indulgences are? Maybe not.  Or, at least, maybe not by choice.  But a recession is upon us and, for most of us, there is not only the possibility but the real likelihood that the champagne will not be flowing and the airline tickets won’t be raining on our heads.  One way or another, we should all be contemplating the recession time strategy of tightening our belts, lowering our expenditures and increasing our savings to ride out this gathering storm. I, for one am going to be trying Mint to see if it can help me achieve some of those those financial goals I’ve procrastinated about.  Where else can I get a financial guru I don’t have to pay, feed, meet with or take to an expensive lunch?

If you try Mint, please do write us and share what you think and how it’s working for you.  If you have any other online, automated financial guru you’d like to recommend, please do.

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Maria Bartiromo moderating a session at the World Economic Forum.

So, when times get tough, as they are today, it’s a good time to get out the scalpel and make the tough choices necessary to cut costs. Here are some suggestions.

Surviving the Tsunami Once It Washes Over You.

• Swing into action the moment you start feeling the effects of the crisis and your back is against the wall. You must immediately communicate with everyone involved– whether vendors, associates or the general public —and tell them exactly what is happening and , at the same time, tell them the concrete, positive steps you are taking to correct things and restore a smooth running operation. Above all, communicate and keep communicating, particularly with your vendors who you want to keep on your side and empathetic with you. In a widespread economic shutdown where we’re all in the same boat they may be more sympathetic than you expect.
• You may have to make decisions about which bills to pay and when. Remember, rent and utilities first.
• You may even have to approach vendors about stretching out your payments. Don’t be timid or gloomy about approaching them. It won’t be the first time they’ve been approached about stretching out payments or working out a different payment arrangement unless this is their first day in business.
  

  Remember: All business like all life is about change. This, too, will pass and good times will return.

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