If you haven’t heard of Mint, then you’re likely not a geek. Mint is a refreshingly useful internet service that enables one to aggregate all of their financial information into one place. It snags transactions from your bank, credit card, investment, loan accounts, and physical assets then categorizes them, and then provides useful insight into your financial habits and helpfully shows things you can do to manage your money more effectively. It also has a handy budgeting tool and offers proactive notifications to your mobile devices of untoward or risky activities that show up across your accounts.

Mint has been in the news lately because some entrenched players (ahem, Intuit) are accusing Mint of overstating their user adoption. You can read the brouhaha at any of the usual fish wrappers around the ‘net. It’s interesting, because I while I will admit to being a little reluctant to place my data in a single web provider, the value exceeds the risk. And, when I really thought about it, the fact that I manage these accounts online anyway, what is the real additional risk? This is a read only service, you can’t move money around for instance.

So, if laboriously managing your financial tool (ala Quicken) isn’t for you, and you’d like a tool that does the work and shows you in a non-obtrusive way how you might be more effective in managing your finances, give Mint a whirl. I like it, a lot. And as for their user counts, I tend to believe Mint because the service is free to end-users, it works, and it’s actually useful. That’s a rare combination these days.