http://www.mint.com/
Out of the list of Web 2.0 Award nominees, I chose to explore mint.com. Mint is basically a free online financial manager. It allows you to link and track all of your finances together including bank and paypal accounts, loans, and other sources of revenue. Mint has the capability of tracking all of your purchases and categorizing them into separate groups for later review of spending throughout the year. Mint also gives you options to create goals within the program by calculating successful budget plans off of your current income, bills, and casual spending, while also providing helpful advice on budgeting and saving money/cutting cost.
After creating a Mint account and attaching all of my financial information to the site, I was surprised to see how accurate and efficient it was. I was able to group previous transactions of the month under specified categories, giving me a better idea of where my money was going and where I could possibly save in the future. The features that I liked the best about this Web 2.0 tool was that it has an overview of your "trends", which breaks down your spending into percentages in a graph form. Another great feature of Mint is that it allows you to create goals of budgeting and paying off bills sooner with a loan calculator which incorporates your current financial situation and gives advice on how to achieve your goal.
Another one of the features that Mint offers is a mobile application that gives you alerts for a plethora of different things. You can set this up to your liking and turn off certain alerts that you dislike. I like this feature, however, after a while I found the alerts to be somewhat distracting, as it alerted me about everything from having a credit card bill due in 3 days to having paid a certain amount in interest on a card that could have been avoided. I can completely appreciate how these features were designed as a possible benifit, but sometimes the amount of information that you are bombarded with becomes overwhelming. Don't get me wrong, Mint is such a wonderful tool for managing your finances, but I already paid my credit card bill... I didn't need to be reminded that it was due in 3 days after the fact.
As far as the options for implementing this into a school or library setting, I definitely think this would be a helpful tool for a teacher who is trying to budget a classroom account, his/her own finances, and reasonably how much they could contribute to the classroom out of their pockets if needed. Individual accounts or even library accounts could be created to manage where money is spent and to keep "better records" to access in future years to compare and progress from. All in All I thoroughly enjoy this free financial management tool and plan to continue using it for my personal finances and financial goals of school loans.
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