Mint.com Acquired by Intuit

Seriously, though, besides budgeting and tracking of expenses, Mint.com allows you to view most, if not all, of your online financial accounts through one site. That assumes, of course, that Mint.com is set up to be able to handle your site.

With the new rules put into place on how financial sites validate logins, you've probably noticed all those extra questions you know have to answer: "What year did you get your first puppy," and things like that. Mint.com handles them fairly well, better than Quicken does in fact.

To be honest, Quicken fails far too often and handling site logins. Right now, after months of working just fine, I cannot retrieve my Chase credit card information. Mint.com? Working just fine.

To be honest, Quicken fails far too often and handling site logins. Right now, after months of working just fine, I cannot retrieve my Chase credit card information. Mint.com? Working just fine.

Intuit plans to keep both Quicken Online and Mint.com as separate offerings. In its press release, the company said:

Mint.com will become the primary online personal finance management service that is offered directly to consumers by Intuit. Quicken Online will connect Quicken customers across desktop, online and mobile to deliver easy, anytime-anywhere access. This will help accelerate Intuit’s ability to create products and services that make managing money easier for all Intuit customers.

Intuit expects the deal to be final by Q4, at which time Mint.com will be join Intuit’s consumer group, with TurboTax and Quicken. Intuit expects the Mint.com purchase to cut its non-GAAP earnings for fiscal 2010 by 2 cents a share. GAAP earnings will be cut by 3 cents.

While the comment above about Intuit screwing up Mint.com is somewhat snarky, it's true that Intuit has made some missteps in the past, including a highly publicized move to put a form of DRM into its TurboTax product that required a reformatting of the hard drive to fully remove (which they backtracked on), as well as charging users $9.95 for additional printouts of returns (which they also backtracked on). It's just a matter of time before a Mint.com FUBAR occurs, as far as I am concerned.