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My first car purchase — 2010 Kia Soul sport

// January 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // General musings

I’ve been wanting to write about the first big purchase of my life, but couldn’t get around to it. However, a recent convo on Twitter energized my thoughts.

I want to make this review quick and to the point.

First, let me say that I love the car. My viewpoint that led me to looking at the Soul — I wanted an SUV (because I always loved driving my mom’s Ford Escape). SUVs are expensive, though, and are generally out of my price range. Also, driving that type of vehicle in the Lowcountry doesn’t seem practical. There is no snow, hills or anything. I’d be better off with something better on gas, but has SUV-type room. This led me in the Honda Element or smaller hatchback options. With all this in mind, when I first saw the Soul I really liked it. It is small, competing with the likes of a Scion or Nissan Cube, but doesn’t possess the boxy look (which I don’t like at all). Instead, the Soul looks like an SUV, just in a miniature form. It also rides like an SUV and when you put the seats down in the back, it has the room like one. It was a perfect fit.

If this is anything like you’d be interested in, then I promise you’ll enjoy the Soul. Just give it a ride. Further details after the jump.

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Mint.com acquired by Intuit

// September 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // General musings

So, Mint.com was just purchased by some of its competitors for a whopping $170 million. The company, which started in the founder’s apartment, went from nothing to multi-millions in three years.

CEO and founder Aaron Spatzer wrote a post about the acquisition of Mint today at Tech Crunch.

I use Mint — its a great, free money-management tool. The downturn of the economy has helped its popularity, indeed, but nothing can take away from its look/feel and ease of use. It simply is a magnificent service to people. I’ll be interested in following this story to see how the future of the company is shaped by this acqusition. And also, hopefully the Mint Life Blog, located on the blogroll to the right, continues as well. It’s easily one of the best personal finance blogs out there.

UPDATE: Courtesy of Mint’s Facebook page … the company is saying nothing will change other than more people will be working with them.

Hey guys–just talked with our VP of Marketing… She wanted to especially express thx to you–our Facebook fans–for your crucial role as early adopters! Regarding your concerns: Mint will remain COMPLETELY free. Being acquired by Intuit means more people working alongside the existing Mint team… possible projects include Android, Blackberry, international, manual-editing-of-transactions, etc

That’s great news. I’ve been pulling for a BlackBerry app since the day Mint released iPhone app. Hopefully that comes sooner, rather than later. A large base of its users are heavy BlackBerry users. I’m expecting even better things out of Mint.com now.

…another update. Don’t like Patzer’s words in there. Playing it as if the Mint team will be looked upon to make the Quicken brand better. I use Mint because I don’t like Quicken. Ugh. I’ll wait and see.