Dobhal.com

For the past 5 years or so, I have been trying to get a better understanding of my personal finances.

• You know the typical questions –What do I spend the most money on ?
• Who got the most of my 5,940,300.00 JPY on my credit cardand what fraction of it?
• Who do I need to boycott to actually save money?
• Is Starbucks really bad for my personal finances?

Well, these questions never got answered…even though I went through implementing various “systems” (read various self-made excel sheets and other random of-the-shelf software programs) at the beginning of every fiscal year. The problem - too much effort. All these methodologies demanded a sincere effort on my behalf. The “lazy” in me would finally give up within a month on the latest “system” and hope for a world where things like monitoring your finances would be effortless. And deep down… I always felt it was the banks responsibility to do so. So why should I take on this burden?Well today I stumbled upon mint.com. My first impression - the site was aesthetically pleasing and pretty damn convincing. Needless to say, I was registered and ready to go in 10 seconds (seriously!).  As I entered the cyber gates of this promised land…. I knew my wishes had been granted. Someone had finally done it - an automated way of tracking your expenses (and figured out a way to capitalize on).

It took me less than 40 seconds to import all my transactions from my credit card/bank. All hail the miracles of web services.  BOOM! ….I knew exactly how much I spent on fuelling my caffeine addiction at Ike’s Coffee Shop last month among many many other things. I was impressed by the auto-categorization of my expenses that allowed me to easily dig into things like my typical monthly averages were at the grocery stores and much, much, more.From an entrepreneurial perspective, the business model definitely appeals to me.  It’s free for the users and mint.com makes money on commissions/referrals when users  use their suggestions to switch vendors or try a new service to save money. (the monetization bit is an assumption - based on elementary my dear Watson). 

Another attempt at contextual advertising? You ask.
I think not. I say better than contextual. I believe this kind of advertising is best described as “Relevant advertising” (a.k.a ”Smack-on” advertising that delivers specific advertisements with an estimate of expected results ) in my books .

 Here is a screen shot illustrating what I am ranting about.   Overall verdict - I am a big fan already. I believe this dot-com will not just survive..it will thrive!