Mint.com

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A few days ago I signed up to use Mint.com for tracking spending and budgeting. We had Quicken in the past, and basically never used it. Even with most stuff importing into Quicken automatically it would take several hours at the end of the month. The result was that we basically went months without doing any real work on tracking our spending.

It took me about 30 minutes to set up all of our bank info, credit cards, etc. Mint linked up quickly and easily, imported the data, and auto categorized most transactions. I spent another 15-20 minutes categorizing the transactions Mint didn't figure out. There's also an iPhone app that makes it incredibly easy to get the status of what's going on with our finances, get detail on transaction, etc. The iPhone app doesn't let you make any updates, but it's great for viewing information. Mint has gotten some great reviews and the best part is that it's free.

We'll see how it goes after a few months. Since setting up the account, importing transactions, and categorizing the unknown transactions took less time than we used to spend on a fully-configured Quicken setup I'm optimistic.