I met Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Mint, at CES last month. He's a very dynamic young man with some real passion currently directed at helping his peers (he's 30 some-thing) get a handle on their finances. He and his team have built a combination expense / wealth tracker based on Yodlee's account aggregation tool. This type of aggregator has been 
around for years, but prior to now have always been aimed at the 50+ traditional financial services crowd.(Think Merrill Lynch, etc.) Aaron has taken the seemingly dry and mundane aspects of money and, using mash-up Web 2.0 techniques, made it not only tolerable, but evidently down right fun! I'll be very honest in telling you that I didn't have real high expectations when I went to check out the site, but I was very pleasantly surprised. From first blush I was impressed --- the green address bar in IE 7.0 told me "it's safe to proceed" (the site uses cutting edge "extended validation" SSL certificates) and I found the process clear and very logically laid out. And --- it's FREE! While there's certainly no reason we "old guys" can't use it, it's clearly designed for our kids. Call yours now and turn them on to Mint.com. It'll help get them off the family payroll sooner!! [smile]
In a related note ---- as long as we're discussing young people and their money --- by now I assume most of you have at least heard of the Ad Council / AICPA cooperative ad campaign called "Feed the Pig" featuring Benjamin Banks, a humanized piggy bank, trying to teach America's young people the virtues of living below their means and actually SAVING money! It's quite clever and has been a big hit among the 20 and 30 some-things. Just as a teaser take a quick at look at this video:
Enjoy.
gll
