time saver. I pay most of my bills this way, but I have to do it through the Bank of America website, or through the websites of the individual payees, like my electric utility NSTAR.
I’d love it if Mint added some kind of bill paying system, since this would save me from having to go back and forth between different sites to manage my finances. That’s something I’d probably be willing to pay for, which—since Mint hasn’t earned a dime off me to date—would be good news for Intuit as well. (With the number of people willing to pay $60 or $70 for a new version of Quicken every year likely to keep dropping, the company certainly needs to figure out additional ways to monetize Mint, beyond the commissions Mint earns for recommending financial products.)
The bottom line: For anyone who doesn’t have an enormously complicated financial situation and just wants to know how much money they have or owe, I think Mint is a perfectly suitable (and obviously much cheaper) alternative to Quicken. Intuit was smart to put Mint founder Aaron Patzer in charge of its personal finance group. Fortunately, as one blogger put it a couple of months ago, “It seems like Patzer is having more of an influence on the Quicken team at Intuit than Intuit is having on him.”
Briefly noted: Amazon has been promising for months now to bring out a Mac equivalent of the Kindle e-book reader software that it released for Windows computers back in October. Yesterday, that happened. I’ve tested the app and it works great—I’m now able to read all of my Kindle editions on my Mac as well as my iPhone and, of course, my Kindle. This just might be fodder for a future column, so please feel free to send me a note at [email protected] if you’ve also given this program a test drive.
For a full list of my columns, check out the World Wide Wade Archive. You can also subscribe to the column via RSS or e-mail, and you can download Pixel Nation, an e-book version of the first 80 columns, as a free PDF file or a $4.99 Kindle edition.
