Many Changes at Mint.Com

Earlier this month Mint.com received another $14 million in series C funding. This round was led by DAG Ventures, and includes Founders Fund. Already investing in Mint are Benchmark Capital, Shasta Ventures, First Round Capital, and Sherpalo Ventures.

Mint.com doesn’t disclose it’s revenues, but Aaron Patzer, CEO told TechCrunch earlier this month that revenue is up over eight times year over year.

Mint has 1.4 Million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets.

Also this month, Mint has offered a new improved Web site to its users. Improvements include better graphing and trending tools as well as the ability to budget for income as well as expenses—which will better help users to project cash flow. Mint now has sixteen graphs that can show you the way around your personal finances.

The budgeting tools have also improved to include an “everything else” category (showing your spending in non-budgeted categories). Also, amounts can be rolled over in Mint from one month to the next. Refreshing indeed!

I’m especially enjoying the new traffic-signal type alert system that shows my budget categories as “All Good,” “Slow Down” and “Over Budget,” in the appropriate red, yellow or green, but responses on the Mint Blog are showing that many readers want the old “bar system” graphic returned (yes, it is helpful, so I can’t blame them).

The iPhone app came out a while ago, but there isn’t one yet for us Blackberry users, I’m hoping that will come soon.

Also, Mint is wisely beginning to utilize some of the vast amounts of consumer data that is available. Since membership is anonymous Mint users like myself don’t have to feel outraged, but companies can study consumerism trends from the data accumulated by Mint. This use will likely help to keep Mint free to users, and profitable, the elusive golden egg that seems to prove so troublesome for so many of these internet finance startups.

Jessica Ward is a freelance writer based in Seattle, Wash. She writes on money, family and life at The Pennywise Family and DebtKid.

Finovate Profile: CalendarBudget

CalendarBudget is going to be a participant at the 2009 Finovate conference later this month.

The company, which was founded by husband and wife team Eric and Robin Poulin in Toronto is planning to exit beta mode just in time for the start of FinovateStartup on April 28th. (Hint: if you want to take advantage of their lower fees for beta users--sign up now!)

CalendarBudget is a unique method for planning your family's budget and expenses, showing it in a visual format. No more spreadsheets. The CalendarBudget system plots your transactions on a calendar. You tag your in-and-out transactions with a category (cable, debt, auto, mortgage for example) and you can see when your monthly ups and downs in income are. It also plots your daily bank balance across the top of the calendar (see example).

For right now, CalendarBudget is free, but upon exiting the beta testing period, there will be a monthly charge of about $5 for beta-testers and $8 for new users. There are also six-month and annual plans. A 30-day free trial period is also available.

Another interesting feature is that CalendarBudget is available for banks and corporate users in an unbranded system, where the client can add their own branded "skin." This could be an excellent value-added-service for banks, credit unions and other financial service providers to offer their customers with their accounts.

CalendarBudget does not aggregate your information, but allows you to import it from several accounts. They are considering offering a free version that would allow users to try the system with one account for free with reduced functionality.

CalendarBudget has been in testing for 18 months with 1200 users worldwide. The platform is intuitive (similar to Outlook) and support is available through their forums.

Jessica Ward is a Freelance Writer in the Seattle area. She also blogs at www.pennywisefamily.blogspot.com. She covers personal finance and family.

At Finovate 2009 Budget Solutions Abound

Holy budgets Batman! Finovate 2009 is showcasing no less than ten (count them 10!) budget solutions for personal finances. I explored some of these on my blog this past week as I wrote all about budgeting for a week, but there’s a lot out there and I couldn't do them justice there.

For the sake of the reader, I’m going to make some categories here to differentiate what might be right for your style as a prospective user or curious reader. Some of these will overlap due to the nature of the features. All are free to use unless otherwise noted. The denotation ($) means fee-based and (*$) means free during Beta trials, or some features are subscriber-based.

I included a “social media” category here—because two of these are very similar to common social applications. Wesabe is a lot like Facebook in that people can recommend or comment and share information. Geezeo has a lot of Twitter-like features and their “confession booth” even integrates with Twitter (not to mention, it's outrageously addictive).

Rudder is in a bit of a class of its own. It appears to include bill-pay features (note to self to play with this one a bit more).

There are essentially two "classes" of personal finance application in my view. Those that require data-entry of transactions, and those that don't. Otherwise, the items below appear in no particular order and none of these are paid placements.

Aggregator
Green Sherpa ($)
Mint
Wesabe
Geezeo

Quicken (*$)
Rudder

Data-Entry

iBearSoft (mobile only) ($)

LooniesDesk (*$)

BudgetPulse

CalendarBudget (*$)

Social Media Features

Wesabe

Geezeo

Mobile Apps
Mint
Green Sherpa ($)

Wesabe
Ibearsoft (*$)
LooniesDesk(*$)