Today I was going through my expenses for the month, and thought to myself, entering numbers off receipts onto Excel and categorizing them is ridiculously tedious. And it’s not like I do anything with all this data I collect about my spending habits. This is really unnecessary and obsessive-compulsive.

What if I designed an application that will do the keeping track for me, by text scraping my electronic statements for my debit card? And then, figure out some way to automatically or efficiently manually categorize every expense. And generate graphs on the fly to visualize my spending and help me budget. Wait, this is a great idea for a startup! Wait, did somebody else already do this?

Looked on Google, and found a gem of a service called Mint. Does all I just described and more, meaning I just wasted an hour going through receipts. Some of the features seem like magic. I think I’m going to buy their stock now.