1. Whether Mint “sold out” by cashing out early instead of building the business for the long-term
2. What will happen to Mint (once considered the anti-Intuit) now that it’s under new ownership

The first topic is interesting, but it’s been done to death by the tech entrepreneur crowd, and I have little to add. Personally, I think it’s great they were able to make a ton of cash off Mint after being around for just three years. More power to them.

As for the second question, worries of Intuit buying and then killing off Mint were not only unfounded, but wildly inaccurate. Not only is Intuit replacing the current Quicken Online with Mint, it’s putting the Mint guys in charge of innovating the Quicken product.

As a long-time Mint user, this is all very exciting. But, I do have one beef with this whole thing: Quicken Online actually has a couple of nice features that Mint doesn’t, and I’d hate to see them get dropped when the current version gets killed off.

Mint is amazing for keeping track of how you spent your money, but is still lacking when it comes to managing the money you’re going to spend. It did get improved budgeting tools a few months ago, but there currently isn’t any way to consider upcoming transactions and their impact on your account balance.

On the other hand, Quicken Online handles this with ease. At a glance, you can see your “RealBalance” — the amount you really have on-hand today dispute transaction lags — and how much discretionary money you have for the next month after bills and automatic withdrawals are considered.

This small feature is extremely useful, and is actually the main reason why I use Quicken Online in addition to Mint right now.

Similarly, Quicken Online gives you a handy graphical representation of how expected future inflows and outflows will affect your account.

Finally, Mint still doesn’t have a way to easily track purchases made with cash. Again, Quicken Online does this without any problems.

Taking a look at the Mint discussion forums, many others have been asking for these features too, and Mint staffers claim the company is hearing the requests. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are working on adding a cash account and upcoming transaction support to Mint in the future, but I just hope they’re able to do it before they replace the current Quicken Online.

Possibly related posts:

1. Keep Track of Your Finances with Wesabe
2. Moneydance

Update @12:30pm: I also recommend reading The New Trough by Naomi Klein on the Rolling Stone website.

The more time passes, and the more that I learn about America’s crumbling financial system, the more I think maybe we should just let it all burn. You know, start over from scratch.

Last month’s “rescue” plan — which I publicly supported given the dire circumstances — has done little to ease the credit markets because banks still aren’t lending to each other. Instead, the geniuses running these failing companies are using taxpayer money to merge with other troubled banks, give massive bonuses to executives who did nothing to deserve them, and fund hugely expensive executive “junkets” at exclusive resorts. The phrase “pissed off” doesn’t come close to describing how angry this makes me.

Via a Twitter post by Tim Bray, here’s your latest must read: The End of Wall Street’s Boom, by Michael Lewis. Michael, a Wall Street veteran of the excesses of the 1980’s, writes at length about a hedge fund manager named Steve Eisman — one of the few people who saw the anticipated the collapse of subprime mortgages and placed bets that their lenders would go bust.

Eisman’s revelations are both infuriating and depressing. The people running and working at the lenders and ratings agencies were some combination of naive, stupid, and evil. They created financial derivatives so complex (and backed up by almost zero assets) that nobody completely understood how they worked or their potential for disaster. They didn’t know what they were doing, but were so blinded by greed that it didn’t matter. And now everyone has to pay for it.

I believe a lot of people are to blame for our country’s current economic mess — gullible borrowers, greedy housing speculators, complaisant government officials. But none of these groups come anywhere close to Wall Street’s role. Fools or crooks, they are largely responsible.

Possibly related posts:

1. Cascading Failure

Several months ago, I started a blog post about a wonderful web application called Wesabe that I’ve been using to keep track of our family’s personal finances. Unfortunately, a tight schedule on my part has meant it never made it out of draft form. Luckily for you, it looks like someone else has just written the overview I was planning. Don’t you love the Internet?

Earlier today, Kyle Pott of the Lifehacker weblog posted an in depth look at Wesabe. It summarizes pretty much everything I’ve been thinking about the web app, so I’m not going to even attempt to reproduce it here. Basically, if Quicken and MS Money seem like overkill to you, and you’re not looking to do the envelope budget ala Mvelopes, give Wesabe a shot. It’s easy to use, more secure than almost any other website I’ve seen (including banks), and free.

On a slight side note, the founders of Wesabe are the model for transparency and openness. They’ve gone the extra mile to ensure that your data remains your data, and have even written up a data bill of rights — a first, as far as I’m aware. And, if you have a question or concern you can’t find an answer to, you can call Wesabe’s CEO any day of the week on his toll free number and ask him directly. I actually did this out of curiosity last spring, and ended up having a very pleasant 10 minute conversation with him. Most CEOs are completely out of reach for the average person, so I find this very impressive.

I think I’ve tried almost every personal finance software/website out there, including Quicken, Money, Mvelopes, Moneydance, Mint, and Wesabe. None of those will be the solution that everyone is looking for. My advice and recommendation to you is this: The best personal finance application is the one you use. If you dread using it, or it takes too long to input your transactions, etc., you’ll simply stop using it in short order. So, look for one that does what you need, and that you enjoy working with. For me, that one is Wesabe.

Possibly related posts:

1. Another Look at Mvelopes
2. Moneydance
3. Quicken Online and Mint

The next time you need to replace a light bulb in your house, consider using one of the compact fluorescent variety. They use less than 2/3 energy than regular incandescent bulbs, last 10 times longer, and will save you over $30 in energy costs over its lifetime.

There have been a couple of eye-opening articles about these bulbs lately. From September’s Fast Company there is How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change the World? One. And You’re Looking At It, and from today’s New York Times there’s Power-Sipping Bulbs Get Backing From Wal-Mart. Both talk about the dramatic energy savings our country would see if every American household replaced just one regular bulb with a compact fluorescent one. We’re talking enough power saved to run a city of 1.5 million people.

If you know me, you know that I’m far from an environmentalist. I may think the Kyoto Protocol is a complete waste of time and effort, but I do believe that small changes that benefit people in real dollars and cents and are good for the environment are our best hope to conserve energy as a nation.

Sure, there will always be a fringe group of people who take part in efforts like the Personal Kyoto project, but the majority of people either need small changes that don’t require too much of them, or need tangible results before committing. So, changing to a light bulb that’s both good for the environment and saves you money should be a pretty easy sell if it’s framed as a “no-duh” decision that you’d be silly to go against.

Possibly related posts:

1. Amory Lovins: Improving Energy Efficiency
2. Household Energy Conservation

First up: My family’s renewed value of our time. Back in college, I religiously entered our receipts into Microsoft Money every day, giving us an almost realtime snapshot of our spending habits. Now with a 10 month old, the new house, the new job, fitness goals, and an MBA degree to finish, categorizing bank transactions isn’t exactly on the top of my to-do list anymore. This means that as good as Moneydance is, it never got off the ground because I couldn’t devote the time needed to keep up with our transactions.

Second, In2M introduced version 3.0 of Mvelopes since I last took a look at it. My biggest gripe with Mvelopes was that it was excruciatingly slow and painful to use because it was written completely in JavaScript. From a quick glance, version 3.0 looks pretty much like the version I was used to, but there is one very important difference: Instead of JavaScript, it’s now a “Rich Internet Application” written using Adobe’s Flex. This just means that it’s delivered as Flash in your web browser. For an application like Mvelopes though, it makes all the difference.

Mvelopes now feels and responds like a desktop program, but it’s Internet delivery means that it’s always updated with your latest transactions and account balances. The “net worth” screen is a powerful example, giving us an automatically updated view of our total assets and liabilities. There are a few tasks that aren’t all that intuitive (like doing account to account transfers), but the documentation is thorough, so it doesn’t take very long to learn the steps.

Through this whole process, I learned that the Mvelopes approach is what I was really needed. Looking at our previous spending in Moneydance isn’t very useful if it doesn’t result in a change in future behavior. Mvelopes requires you to think about the tough questions surrounding your money up front, making the actual day-to-day choices relatively painless.

So, I give Mvelopes 3.0 two big thumbs up, and would recommend it to anyone wanting to get a better grasp on their finances.

Possibly related posts:

1. Moneydance
2. Keep Track of Your Finances with Wesabe
3. Quicken Online and Mint

In addition to the career change I talked about a few days ago, I’m also working on an exit strategy of a different kind. It isn’t quite as dramatic, but I’ve been planning this one for a number of years: Moving to an all Apple household.

Last fall I mentioned how I had been spending an increasing amount of my time working within my web browser and on the Internet, making my choice of operating system largely irrelevant. Really, there was only one piece of desktop software that was tying me to Windows, and that was Microsoft Money. Years ago I selected that program as my personal finance manager of choice, so eventually it contained a very large amount of information about my family’s spending habits and financial history. The software did was it was supposed (and did it well), but there is/was one problem: Money is Windows only.

In the middle of October, I found what I thought would be the answer to my long time wish: a web-based personal money manager called Mvelopes Personal . It’s a different take on the idea of money management than Quicken or Money, using a virtual envelope system to fund your different spending categories. My favorite part was that it automatically pulls transaction data from a huge list of institutions to give you an up-to-date picture of each account.

The killer (in a bad way) for me though, was that it was cumbersome to use and not intuitive at all. Mvelopes is a heavyweight JavaScript program (as opposed to the new lightweight approach taken by AJAX), which made it slow on most of the computers I tried and completely unusable on one of them. The software itself took a lot of time to setup and configure, and required me to go through a multi-step process to complete a simple and regular task like recording a money transfer between our checking and savings accounts. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed. (Update: Mvelopes has gone through several major updates since I first wrote this, and this performance issue has long since been fixed)

In the end, I realized that the Mvelopes approach wasn’t actually what I was looking for. The program uses its built-in budgeting plan (the envelope funding idea), which doesn’t work all that well with the simple budget system we follow from the book All Your Worth (must haves, wants, and savings). One option was to switch to Quicken on our PC and then Quicken for Mac once we made the complete jump to the Mac OS, but I haven’t heard very good things about the Macintosh version of the popular money manager. My options were getting pretty small…

Then, a couple of days ago I came across a personal finance manager called Moneydance. The first awesome thing: It’s truly cross platfrom because it’s written in Java. That means you can get the same experience if you’re using Windows, Mac OS, or even Linux. Second, it’s simple. It lets me keep track of our spending and create a budget if I want, but it doesn’t worry about tracking retirement accounts or finding tax deductions. I’m a very passive investor, dollar cost averaging into market index funds, so I have no need (or desire) to constantly track their performance. The final great thing about Moneydance is that it looks like it will finally unteather us from Windows so we can pickup one of the new iMacs!

Possibly related posts:

1. Keep Track of Your Finances with Wesabe
2. Another Look at Mvelopes
3. Quicken Online and Mint
4. PeopleSoft Still Sucks