“I hate budgeting and am not disciplined enough to track my spending. Am I hopeless?”

Nonsense, Edward! Maybe you were hopeless a decade ago, but technology has come to your rescue.

Nearly seven in 10 Americans, young and old, have relied on the Web for help with personal economic issues during the recession, according to a Pew Research Center report.

Mint.com, which was recently purchased by Intuit, maker of Quicken, and a handful of sites like it, work by linking to your bank accounts and credit cards and downloading the information into a single, easy to use interface. You can analyze how, when and where you spend your money using nifty charts and graphs, and can set up alerts that warn you when you're about to blow your budget or overdraw an account. Most are free.

Like it or not, using Mint.com, I now know my family spent $188 at McDonald's, $702 on kid clothes and $124 on movies and DVDs in 2009.