I've been a strong advocate of this web app for the longest time because of how effective it has been for me in creating a budget that I've then STUCK to. Prior to using Mint, I've made all sorts of budgets on paper, in spreadsheets and with envelopes. It works, but it's difficult to stick with because of how much time it takes to document all your purchases and sort out what is being spent where. Manually categorizing everything is extremely time consuming and thus for most people, you lose interest and there goes your budget. Mint automates the difficult tracking portion of this by hooking in to your bank account to populate its data. Don't worry, it's safe as the service is provided by Intuit, a large company that sells accounting software for companies. Check it out at mint.com, I promise you it's worth the initial time taken to learn it.
