This is the question that Mint.com asked me when I was trying out their “online money management website”.

Mint is a piece of software that will download transaction history information from your bank’s website, and put it up against your other account information to create a comprehensive reporting of where your money is going.

The trick is, if you are like me and spend alot of cash, it doesn’t explain everything.  The things it does the best with are your electronic transfers.  The times when you used your debit card to pay for things.

Some features that I liked:

It hooked into Sallie Mae and all my bank accounts, and then it calculated my net worth.  I don’t like my net worth, but to be able to monitor it here was very cool.

It will give you graphs that show you how your total spending breaks down.

It will help you set up a budget and monitor your spending.

If your account gets low, it sends you an email.

If you have an “alert” like a finance charge from the bank, it will tell you.

I’m on my phone posting this, actually.

I was looking for a barcode scanner application and found pricepad instead. It is a free app that allows you to save information about items you want to buy to your phone.
You can save name, price, barcode number, genre of item, and personal notes. Then when you are looking at the same item later, you can search through your saved items.

I am going to give it a try for grocery shopping, starting by putting the items from the circulars in first.