My few but loyal readers may have across the new Mint button under about this blog.   What is it you might ask.  Actually I have the exact same question.   I added the link to increase the liklihood that I would be selected for the beta program.  Apparently it’s some type of online personal financial management that can serve as replacement for Quicken.  I came across it at a post at LazyManAndMoney.   He peaked my curiousity, and ended up filling out Mint’s survey.  I’m curious to see what it is.

At the moment, I’m actually generally pretty pleased with my current system.   I only track cash as a broad category (CASH), but I try to keep my cash transactions to minimal.   Almost all my cash expenditures are related to either lunch or beer.   What I do do is track every credit card purchase on Yodlee.   I log into yodlee every couple days and categorize my transactions (or recategorize if need be).  Yodlee is actually pretty good at tracking merchants once you’ve already categorized them, and as a result I have very few categorizations to manually assign.    In general I’m a big fan of their service.  Then at the end of the month I import everything manually via copy and paste to Excel, and run a macro.   I’m a bit of Excel Wonk (or at least used to be as my skills have gotten rusty), and find that this system gives me alot more flexibility than Quicken ever did, and it’s less work.   If Mint has something better to offer than I’m willing to give it a shot.  Now if Microsoft would only release a half decent version of Excel for the Mac…