Mint.com is a website that enables users to aggregate financial information and build reports.  The site is relaunching a new design today with enhanced financial features and educational tools. 

Mint.com Features
Some of the new features that Mint.com has added since launching last September includes budgeting tools, brokerage/investment accounts, mortgage accounts, student loans, and auto loans.  Mint.com is also launching How-To guides, where experts give advice on planning retirement, paying student loans, buying a car, creating a personal budget, etc.

One of the best features Mint.com offers is monitoring the APR on your credit cards and providing suggestions on ways to save money.  Personally I’d like to find out more information about credit cards that offer 0% APR until a certain month.  I just switched to a Bank of America credit card for 0%, but not based on Mint.com’s recommendation.  I actually received the information about the Bank of America 0% APR credit card from a pamphlet in the mail.

The purpose of Mint.com’s new design is that it those looking for a specific financial purpose find it right on the homepage.  Notice the retirement, student loan, buying a car, and paying off debt at the bottom?  Who doesn’t want to do that?  According to Mashable, Mint.com made double-digit growth when adding the new look in turning visitors into members. 
 

The new Mint.com looks pretty cool.  I haven’t played around with Mint in a while, but I’m sure I’ll get into it when I have money lying around in many different accounts.  Mint.com has about $17 million in funding.

As I look around my downtown Minneapolis apartment, I realize that like most Americans, I have a lavish lifestyle and own many possessions that I do not need. Some of the things I own is enough to make Tyler Durden want to pick a fight with me. On my coffee table there are unwatched Netflix movies and in my TV cable package, there are movie channels that I never flip to. Yet I still pay for this every month.

I also have 4-5 credit cards that I live off of. Since I pay all my minimum balances on-time, these credit companies give me more to spend. Have I been able to pay it all off yet? No. Have I been tracking my accounts carefully and created a plan to pay off all my credit? No.

This is the benefit of Mint.com. Mint allows users in America to import all of their bank accounts and credit card to track and consolidate all transactions and balances. Then Mint reports where your money is going and gives alerts for when something seems out of the ordinary.

For example, on March 4, Mint sent me an alert that TCF Bank charged me a fee of $5.95 and that my Citi Mastercard has $85 available left for credit. This means I’d better find out why my bank charged me and to pay off my Citi Mastercard balance as much as I can to prevent a bad credit rating.

Mint also shows a chart of your financial health performance. Essentially, it shows how much cash you have on-hand versus the debt you owe.

Mint also makes recommendations on ways for you to save. For example, Mint found that one of my credit cards has a 23.74% APR and recommends that I get a Discover Card instead which has a $170 cashback reward and has a 10.99% APR. APR, or annual percentage rate is the true rate of interest you are paying on a card.

Mint.com allows finance amateurs like myself to understand how to balance cashflow. This is why I am happy to report that some investors have chosen to help Mint develop their business further by providing them some additional capital.

Mint’s first round of investment was $325,000 in seed capital provided by First Round Capital. Then the company raised $4.7 million from First Round, Shasta Ventures, Hite Capital, and a couple of other independent investors. And yesterday, TechCrunch announced that Mint is raising an additional third round of $12.1 million.

Aaron Patzer, founder and CEO of Mint told users that he is planning to add international support later in the year starting with Canada and then the UK. Eventually they will also add Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, and Italy. Starting March 20th, Mint will also have further positions and performance across all accounts and not just viewing the balances.

Once this phase is complete, Mint will also further develop their savings engine and give more recommendations to users for saving money. Users will see the monetary benefits of using Mint and I highly recommend creating an account.

Aaron Patzer had a vision in November 2005.  When using Quicken for his own personal accounting, Aaron realized that he was running through a lot of tedious work.  Patzer then started developing Mint, a Web 2.0 tool that is used for all the different forms of money management.

Today, Mint is backed by First Round Capital and previous executives from eBay, Google, Charles Schwab, and Reuters.  Josh Kopelman became a Mint Board of Director after investing into the company.  Kopelman is the founder of Half.com, which eBay bought in June 2000 for $318 million.  Mint’s current funding is $5 million.

As of tonight, Mint has another award to list as an accomplishment: the TechCrunch40 Conference 2007 winner.  The personal finance application will take home $50,000 as an award.

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