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If you’ve been looking for a simple way to track your spending, make a budget, or follow your investments – without splashing out any dough – then online finance managers might be just up your alley. Let’s take a look at Mint and Rudder, two very similar money management sites that give you the tools to manage your hard-earned cash.

Getting started with Mint couldn’t be easier: you’ll just need to hand over the username and password to your financial institution (you can reassure yourself with Mint’s privacy policy, along with a detailed FAQ of security issues).

It’s easy to add accounts to your Mint dashboard, and thousands of financial institutions are available from which to choose from. In less than five minutes total, I was looking at an extremely detailed (yet manageable) analysis of three of my accounts, along with transaction information, spending trends, saving suggestions, and more.

Those of us who are financial software-phobic will love Mint’s simple yet comprehensive financial habits breakdown. There’s nothing you have to dig through a manual to understand here – it’s all pretty basic. For instance:

Overview: This is your main dashboard where you can see a quick snapshot of what your money’s been doing: recent account activity, budget trends, any alerts, etc.

Spending Trends: This gives you a pie chart o’spending; you can dig down within each category to see what your spending looks like. This is Quicken without the hassle.

Transactions: You can get a quick overview of all your accounts at once here, filter them by individual account, search via transaction type or just type in a search term (i.e., “Costco”).

Ways to Save: Mint pays the bills with sponsored offers on the “Ways to Save” page; this is also where you’ll be offered potential moneysaving deals, such as a higher interest rate for your savings account.

Mint Alerts: The most convenient tool that Mint offers is email or SMS alerts that can warn you if you’re going over your credit limit, about to incur some fees, getting a bit low in your account, and a lot more. This is an amazingly simple yet super awesome way to stay on top of your finances.

Mobile Access: You can access your entire Mint profile from the convenience of a Web-enabled phone or mobile device. For instance, if you text “Bal” (balance) to “MyMint” (696468), you’ll get instant balance reports for any account you’ve added to your Mint dashboard – and as we’re heading into the holiday season, this comes in especially handy.

Credit Management: Mint also offers a credit management program that scans for better interest rates and fees in addition to information on how to lower your current credit card debt – again, all for free.

Investment Management: You can manage all your investments – 401K, brokerage accounts, etc. – in one easy portal with Mint (rather than logging into one out of the way site after another). Also, since Mint automatically updates your investment information, you can stay on top of exactly what’s going on, rather than relying on an annual update.

Pros:

· You don’t have to balance anything; it’s all done for you.
· Read-only connection to bank accounts according to privacy policy.
· Excellent credit card management program; scans for better interest rates and fees and gives you information on how to lower your current debt.
· Easy to set up alerts
· Free!

Cons:

· You can’t import from any other financial software (such as Quicken), and you can’t take Mint data anywhere else.
· Mint also trusts your bank or other financial institution to be completely right, there are no inherent checks and balances.
· Good for keeping track, but shouldn’t be the only thing you use - always go to the source.
· Can’t be used offline.

Rudder initially is not as easy to set up as Mint. The process is similar: pick your financial institution, hand over your username and password (read the privacy policy), and wait for your information to be extrapolated. However, this initial step alone took nearly five minutes – compared to about thirty seconds for Mint, and everything at Rudder must be entered manually. Yes, that’s right – manually.

Once you’ve added in your data, Rudder will identify your recurring bills and expenses. You also have to add in your income, which unless you work a straight paycheck to paycheck kind of job is not the most intuitive way to track your revenue.

However, Rudder’s not necessarily about the nitty-gritty details (and this is where a lot of people might say “thanks, but no thanks”). Rudder likes to focus on your big fiscal picture via broad stroke financial widgets that track this activity, such as:

Spend Meter: a simple way to tell if you’re spending beyond your means, but it won’t give you exact dollar amounts.

Savings Widget: A simple way to track your savings.

Bill Tracker: See if there’s anything upcoming that needs to be paid.

Rudder also offers emails (daily, weekly, monthly) to give you your account overview without actually having to log in to your account – you can get these via your Web-enabled phone or mobile device.

Pros:

· Easy to use
· Good for overall tracking
· Email-based; manage your finances via your inbox

Cons:

· Requires a manual setup
· Not good for specific money management

Rudder is definitely a simple, no-clutter tool for tracking your finances...emphasis on simple. If you’re looking for a big picture sort of tool that gives you an overall view of your money, then Rudder might be a good pick.

Many of us have a nagging feeling in the back of our minds that we’re just not doing enough to manage our money, so we purchase expensive financial management software packages that end up sitting unused on the shelf. Both Mint and Rudder aim to solve this problem, providing free, simple, yet powerful money management tools that anyone can use, no matter what their level of financial expertise.

However, Rudder, while somewhat useful, only provides a core overview of your finances and is tedious to initially get going. In addition, there’s not much in the way of actually teaching you to manage your money more efficiently; it’s a tool aimed at showing you what you have left in your account, and that’s pretty much it.

On the other hand, Mint is simple to set up and gives you a detailed yet completely understandable money analysis, with tools that can quickly help you become more financially savvy. Credit, investments, budgets – all of these are concepts that many of us tend to avoid, but Mint makes them accessible using our own accounts as a springboard to a healthier financial outlook. While Rudder is a good tool to get you going in the quest for fiscal improvement, Mint is a better long-term choice.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, bns124

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Mint SMS: Monitor Your Finances On the Go
Rudder Helps You Manage Your Money From Your Inbox (The Startup Review)
Mint.com Launches Redesign with New Financial Resources and Educational Tools
Mint.com Offers Web-based Financial Tracking Tools
Personal Finance Site Mint Opens to The Public With New Features
Thrive Wants to Help 20 and 30-Somethings Manage Their Money
BillShrink Wants to Help You Manage Your Credit Cards

Live-streaming TV on the iPhone? That’s what Livestation is promising, with a video demo of an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, though the app hasn’t yet been accepted by Apple. Livestation offers peer-to-peer enabled streams from providers such as the BBC and Al Jazeera.

However, the app, once accepted by Apple, is only going to be available for Wi-Fi, which somewhat limits its utility, unless you live in one of those lucky towns with municipal Wi-Fi or happen to commute on a Wi-Fi enabled bus, train or plane.

In other video-on-iPhone news, Joost’s newly launched iPhone — which was also initially Wi-Fi only — is coming to 3G (which means you’ll actually be able to take it on the go), Joost CEO Mike Volpi told Beet.tv. Volpi said 3G access will only apply to some of Joost’s library, but it will be coming “very very shortly.”

On Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jane Jacobs, 2001, Star Wars, and minimalism: Star Wars: A New Heap.

Kubrick's film presented a future of company men moving with assurance and clear intention toward a godlike minimalist object. Lucas, on the other hand, gave us a slapdash world of knuckleheads pursued by industrial-scale minimalists. Visually, Kubrick's film is as seamless and smooth as the modernist authority it mirrored. Like the mid-century modernists, 2001 associated abstraction with the progressive ideals of the United Nations as embodied by its New York headquarters. Lucas, on the other hand, was a nonbeliever. Even the initially smooth and unitary form of the Death Star was shown, as the rebel fighters skimmed its surface, to be deeply fissured with an ever-diminishing body of structural fragments. These crenulated details suggested a depth and complexity to modern life that modernism's pure geometries often obscured.

And this:

A flying saucer had never been a slum before. The immaculate silver sheen of the saucer was reinvented as a dingy Dumpster full of boiler parts, dirty dishes, and decomposing upholstery. Lucas's visual program not only captured the stark utopian logic that girded modern urban planning, it surpassed it. The Millennium Falcon resisted the modernist demand for purity and separation, pushing into the eclecticism of the minimalist expanded field. Its tangled bastard asymmetry made it a truer dream ship than any of its purebred predecessors. It is the first flying saucer imagined as architecture without architects.

(thx, matt)