Discover: Mint.com

For those of you who are looking for a FREE budgeting/alerting/reporting tool for your personal finances, this is the site you've been waiting for.

Here is how it works:

You give the site your logins to all your online accounts (savings/checking/401k/stocks/ROTHs/CDs/Money Marketing/Credit Cards/Car loans/school loans/etc) and it will log in with read-only access. Using the same security standards as banks, the site logs in and downloads all of your transactions/changes that's been done to your account.

Using other users tagging (the site has over half a million users), it will know which transactions fall under which categories (food, utilities, entertainment, etc). With this knowledge, it builds trending information and compares you to the average American. This gives you the ability to create personal (and REALISTIC) budgeting goals. Being able to consolidate all of your accounts into this reporting tool, you can see from a high level where you are going. You can also create alerts (email/mobile) on when you go over budget or when a large purchase hits. You can also have a weekly/monthly email of your biggest purchase for that week (among other things) as well as trending. And if you click on the Investments tab, it shows you how your stocks/mutalfunds/401k's are doing against the market as well as if you are making money or not (price bought at and what it's currently valued at). I also hear that if you use them for a full year, tax season is a little less painful.

Seeing there is no advertisement on the site, you might wonder how they make money. They will offer other options (credit cards/loans/etc) if they see saving opportunities and if you accept their option, they get a piece. It's basically like a financial advisor but automated and online.

So what's the downside?

The only one I can see is a (potential) security risk. They have security certifications from a number of respectable security companies and all the reviewers I've seen believe that they are as secure as any other online bank out there. Since they don't ask for your social or date of birth (you sign up with email/zipcode/password--that's it)... even if they did get a breach, the only thing that would get compromised is your online accounts (not your identity--unless those online accounts give them more). While this can be a huge issue with some online banking sites, for the most part, it's still difficult to do much with the access. A pain, sure, but so is any other online venture. I would, however, recommend using a password that is long, complex, and not something you use anywhere else since your email is easy to find.

Edit: Found out today that mint doesn't store your logins, they only store the transactions for trending/budgeting purposes. They use a third party (Yodlee) to login into your accounts--they are the ones the actually store your login information. Take a look at their customers:

http://www.yodlee.com/customerspartners_cu.shtml

 For more features, click here.