Personal finance is something that is probably now more important than ever. We are in the worst recession since World War II. Watching every penny is key as credit card companies tighten the vises, ahead of the February credit card reforms.

In case you have been living under a rock, Mint.com succeeded where MinuteTracker.com failed… screen scraping all the data from your financial institutions and parsing the data into one global financial organizer. Now owned by Intuit (just acquired rather), the company now has the tool that has evaded Quicken for years; proper, real-time integration of financial data that just works.

Here’s why I don’t like Mint.com. It’s too automated. A lot of their advice is ad-sponsored, such as their one-click advisor to handle balance transfers on credit cards. Unfortunately, it focuses on the trees (mainly, referral/affiliate earnings) and not the forest (mainly, balance transfer fees and shrinking 0% teaser rate periods).

Worse, people can easily become complacent by using the service. It’s easy to just “check back after a few weeks” and watch all your data get magically updated. Having instantly-updating data is nice, unfortunately, it also makes people passive to the notion that they’re watching their money.

I personally prefer to go to each financial institution and doing something called… writing. I write down the numbers, and parse my own financial stats. Shocking, yes. Old school? Sure. But, it lets me do my own analysis, and watch where each penny actually goes. If I wait two weeks to update my financial data, that means I have to spend more time doing analysis. The more analysis I do, either day to day, or every week… it doesn’t matter as much as taking the time, and doing the research.

My advice: Use both, and see for yourself. Mint.com is easy to see all your balances, from all your financial institutions, but I seriously caution you to run your own analysis outside of any web site. Don’t rely on any single source, ever, to make your own financial decisions.

My advice for improving Mint.com… let people be free-form with their analysis. For example, what if I want to set thresholds from financial institutions so that I can isolate my emergency fund from the rest of my cash? A simple asset listing of debt versus credit overlooks what you need to do to gain financial stability.