This one’s a little update on the way we’re managing our budget these days (read our first post on the subject).  Ever since Mint came on the radar back in 2006, I’ve been clamoring to make it our budget management tool of choice.  Here’s a quick look at Mint’s main features:

• Ability to import transactions from multiple checking, savings, and investment accounts (many, many banks now supported)
• Great budgeting and goal planning tools
• Mobile access to your Mint account on iPhone and Android
• Recommendations for new banking services based on the accounts you already have

It’s essentially a souped up, web-based version of Quicken that was eventually bought-out by Intuit, the makers of Quicken products.  The problem was that our bank (United Federal Credit Union, it rocks!) wasn’t supported by Mint at the time.  So we’ve been waiting and waiting for UFCU and Mint to become friends, and just recently, they did!

We’ve basically eliminated Quicken for Mac from our budget management process.  We still use a master spreadsheet to keep track of our income and expenses each month, but Mint does all of the heavy lifting for us.  Add in the iPhone app, and it’s a huge win.  With the ability to look at the numbers on my phone, we’re able to make purchase decisions while we’re at the store.

Now, we know what you’re thinking… this all sounds great, guys, but do you really expect me to hand over my bank account information to these guys?  Isn’t that totally unsafe?

That’s what we thought at first.  What’s to stop this little start-up from accessing our accounts and cleaning them out?  The truth is, while that might have been cause for concern in the beginning, Mint has established itself as the premier online tool for budgeting and money management.  Heck, they were even acquired by Intuit (makers of all those nifty Quicken products) for $170 million last year.  We think it’s safe to continue using Mint to manage our finances.

In the next few weeks, we’ll bring you some additional posts about how we use the various individual features of Mint.  Until then, why not give it a try?

We talked about Groupon a while back, and at the time we were pretty sad because it hadn’t yet launched in our area.  That’s changed this week as Groupon Grand Rapids has made its way to the good ‘ol world wide web!

If you’ll recall, the idea behind Groupon is to offer a worthwhile, location-based deal.  A threshold of purchases must be met before “the deal is on” (rarely does this not happen, if ever), and to our knowledge, there isn’t a limit to the number of purchasers.  This deal looked pretty darn tasty to us, but we didn’t happen to go for it.  (Actually it kind of reminded us of Restaurant.com, in a way.)

We think Groupon is great, and it follows in line with other great “entertainment shopping” sites like Woot!, LivingSocial, and others.  But, as we conjectured in our ode to Woot!, there’s always a little bit of danger when it comes to sites like these.  You run the risk of spending money that you didn’t expect to spend, and most times, your budget’s not going to be happy with that.  But, if you happen to run across a deal for something that you were looking for already… well, then that’s worth going for!

I recently came across banksimple, a new online bank that is due to open up for business later this year.  I had stumbled upon the first post in banksimple’s blog, which makes some pretty strong arguments against the current state of banking in the United States today.  Their premise is that most American banks have lost sight of what once was their original purpose and vision: to take care of their customers’ money; that the consumer is in a losing position due to unfair fee structures and lack of customer service.

I made a quick note to keep an eye on banksimple, until later, when I heard one of their founders, Alex Payne (one of the original employees at Twitter) talking on Dan Benjamin’s podcast, The Pipeline.  If you’re interested in hearing how new technology will change the way we manage our money, I would definitely recommend giving it a listen.  It’s really exciting stuff, and we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for banksimple‘s launch later this year.  It sounds like they’ll be doing some really interesting things with mobile apps, cell phone imaging for deposits, etc.

In the meantime, we are extremely satisfied with the banking experience at our local credit union.  They give us great customer service (although it appears the tellers are instructed and encouraged to make the sell for credit cards and lines of credits), ATM fee refunds, and a current interest rate of 3.65% on our balance up to $25,000.  It’s a great place to bank, but competition’s always good for the consumer, so we’re looking forward to what banksimple will do to the market.