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An upstart called Mint is trying to help the vast numbers of young people who, for the most part, do not know how to manage their money. Founded by Aaron Patzer, Mint has recently won two major awards (TechCrunch40 and Finovate 2007) after a debut in September 2007. Mint offers a patent-pending algorithm that automatically puts users' expenses into pre-decided categories and tracks their spending, getting rid of the need to balance a checkbook. The site also gives advice on ways to save money. More than 40,000 people signed up for the free service, which requires an email address, password, and zip code to get started, in its initial two weeks. One of the first suggestions Mint's users asked for was the ability to monitor their student loan accounts, reflective of the fact that college graduates have about $20,000 in loans when they leave school, not to mention $3,000 in credit-card debt. In order for Mint's algorithm to keep track of a user's expenses, it is necessary for the user to provide all the information for credit-card and bank accounts. Obviously, this brings up some security issues. Mint uses the same technology as Bank of America and Microsoft Money to retrieve account data and hopefully keep the information safe.
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