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Today I received an email from Mint.com which I have been using for more than 2 years now that Mint.com to be acquired by Intuit, maker of Quicken. This email was sent out by the CEO of Mint.com, Aron Patzer, tilted as “Ready for the next Evolution”.

This is the content:

Thank you for being a part of what’s becoming a revolution in active personal financial management. I’m excited to say that Mint.com and Intuit are coming together to take personal finance to the next level. Mint.com has entered into an agreement to be purchased by Intuit. Once the acquisition closes, Mint.com will have the opportunity to spread that revolution to more people, more quickly, together with one of the world’s strongest software brands. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2009.

What’s not going to change

Mint.com will stay the way you like it: free, easy-to-use and constantly improving.

What will change

As outlined in today’s press release and my blog post, after the acquisition closes, the Mint.com team will contribute to improving the financial lives of tens of millions of consumers and small businesses. I’ll personally be taking on the role of GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance group responsible for online, desktop and mobile consumer personal finance offerings. Joining Intuit enables us to bring our vision of helping consumers understand and do more with their money to millions of Intuit customers.  This is a compelling combination of our innovative product, technology, and industry leading user interface design with one of the most trusted brands in software.
I look forward to executing on that vision — for you.<
Thanks for your support,
Aaron Patzer
Founder and CEO

As far as I know Intuit paid Mint.com for $170 million! Intuit is the NO. 1 maker of personal finance softwares like Quicken, QuickBooks, and TurboTax. As more and more customers are switching their service from desktop to internet, this move will also make the Intuit to take the NO. 1 place in the internet-based personal finance provider. Mint.com claims to have ~1.5 million users tracking nearly $50 billion in assets and $200 billion in transactions.

Mint.com is offering free credit score promotion—free FICO credit score for Mint.com users! This is a limited time offer which is ended on November 26, 2008. This is a special promotion from Mint.com partnered with myFICO.com to offer mint.com users a free credit score.

All mint.com users have received the email titled “Get a Free FICO Credit Score: Limited Time offer to Mint.com users”. The email indicated that:

Through an exclusive partnership with myFICO, you can get this valuable information free when you visit Mint.com before November 26, 2008.

What is FICO credit score?

First, FICO is the acronym for Fair Isaac Corporation, a publicly-traded corporation that created the best-known and most widely used credit score model in the United States. So FICO score is the credit score most lenders use to determine your credit risk. Your score is based on information the credit bureau keeps on file about you. The FICO score is primarily used in credit decisions made by banks and other providers of secured and unsecured credit. Only myFICO actually is offering FICO score to general US consumers. We usually get the credit score from our credit reporting agencies. However, those are not real FICO score. It’s not normal to see there are up to 100 difference in credit scores provided by credit reporting agencies. For example, TransUnion might say your credit score is 756, but Equifax indicates that your credit score is only 687! The reason behind this is those credit reporting agencies are only using similar model to estimate your FICO score but absolutely not real FICO score. Usually, people call those scores are FAKO score to distinguish from the FICO score.

Consumers who received the invitation email can login to Mint.com and click the “Get my FICO score now” tab at the mint.com account. This will lead you to www.freeficoscore.com which indicates that only the first 40,000 responding can get the free FICO score. It’s free. NO credit card required. And no obligation.

You need to put your SSN and address to verify your personal information to get the FICO score.

I have a post named “6 Web Based Personal Finance Tools” which introduces many web based personal finance tools. I think most of the users of the 6 personal finanace websites have received the offer. Since your FICO credit score directly influence your loan rate, and your other financial matters in your life, it’s important to know your FICO score. Do not miss this chance!

I reported that the Quicken Online now goes free for everyone. Actually, there are many free online personal financial tools. Those finance tools are thought to be very useful for customers to check their daily spending, pay bills, and set budget. The difficult part is finding the right tool to fit your needs. Hereby I introduce 6 popular web based personal finance tools that might be of help to you.

Mint

Website: www.mint.com

Mint is a free web-based financial management service. The primary service provided by Mint is to track bank, credit card, investment, and loan transactions and balances through a simplified user interface. Mint is very popular because of its simple setup and easy to use budgeting tools. After you give Mint your online account information, Mint can automatically retrieves your latest financial data from your online financial institutions. And you can set how often you want it to report to you. Mint can do a lot of hard work to help you track your spending, make budgets and set alerts. If you want to use a online service to track your spending, Mint is the top choice.

Yodlee

Website: www.yodlee.com

Yodlee provides account aggregation and other online financial services. Yodlee allows users to see their credit card, bank, investment, email, travel reward accounts on one screen. Perhaps, Yodlee is the most popular free online financial service. Yodless is also famous for offering mobile banking feature. The Yodlee MoneyCenter is a popular web application that allows consumers to manages their finances online. It is a free web application that provides much of the popular personal finance functions of Intuit’s Quicken with features such as bill payment, expenses tracking, and investment management. As a matter of fact, Bank of America’s My Portfolio service is powered by Yodlee. If you want to get all of your personal finance in a single place, Yodless is a good choice.

Buxfer

Website: www.buxfer.com

Buxfer is also a free online personal finance software for budgeting and expense management. You can even transfer your money online using Buxfer. Most interesting part is buxfer can track the transactions for a group. The group can then split bills based on the summary from Buxfer. Buxfer also has lot of fantastic web applications which can be used on iPhone, facebook, Google and other mobile devices. But, to be honest, I don’t trust buxfer very much. It’s more like a study-group based product.

Geezeo

Website: www.geezeo.com

Geezeo is a free online personal fiance management software. It provides free budgeting tools, financial advice, and even a forum for members to discuss about. Geezeo also provide some finance products like credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, loans and even mortgages. The Geezeo is not merely a personal finance tool. But the service is not so great as Mint and Yodlee.

Wesabe

Website: www.wesabe.com

Wesabe helps users track spending and set financial goals. The coolest part of Wesabe is it can provide your personal date and then compare to others”. In this way, you can find out how to save a penny! You can even share your idea on how to spend smarter at the community of Wesabe. Wesabe also has a team of personal finance adviser to answer question and propose ideas in the community. My only worry is as they indicate”We do this by aggregating and analyzing our community members’ personal financial data, and showing tips — recommendations to get the most from our money.” So your personal financial information seems not safe there.

Quicken Online

This is the last one I want to introduce here because I just covered the Quicken Online two days ago at here.