The Economy According To Mint

Aaron Patzer is the CEO and founder of Mint.com , a personal finance site that helps 900,000 consumers keep track of their spending. Mint's data is a snapshot of the consumer economy. In the guest post below, Aaron parses the data to tell us what the economy looks like from consumer's eyes. Consumers are hurting, but if Mint's data is indicative of the economy as a whole, it is not as bad as you might think. (Mint was the the winner of our first TechCrunch40 conference, an experience Aaron wrote about in another guest post ). At the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland this week, it’s a somber environment. Nearly every session – at least every session that’s full – is about the global economic crisis. While there is much rhetoric and shifting of blame, there is little mention of hard data beyond stock market declines and the price of bailouts. As an engineer, and founder of a company where one of our core values is “quantify everything” , lack of numbers bothers me. How bad are things really? Answers like “really bad” or “worst since the Great Depression” just don’t do it for me. What does it mean in dollars and cents?