A million users have signed up for Mint.com, the online money management tool, since its launch 18 months ago. The company unveiled a new feature – Financial Fitness – at the Finovate conference in San Francisco today.

First a quick overview: Mint users register anonymously, and then add login information for bank accounts, credit cards, etc. Mint automatically tracks and classifies spending in specific categories; sends email alerts and bill reminders to help avoid bank fees and overdraft charges; and suggests financial products and services to help save money.

The new feature takes financial tracking to a new level, giving users various challenges in five categories, and explaining why and how they should address the task. Successful behavior is rewarded with a higher fitness score. Categories include spending less than you earn; knowing your credit score; using credit and debt wisely; investing; and preparing for the unexpected. For instance, Mint can track whether the user has paid down credit card balances and stayed within their credit limit, and they accumulate points for smart money behavior.

The feature explains “why is this important task and exactly how — with a series of tools and resources — to perform that,” says CEO Aaron Patzer. “It shows how many times in a row you hit your budget, or saved or avoided bank fees, and when you’re 80 percent financial fit you get a trophy. If you hit 100 percent for six months you’re a financial guru. It (gives users) positive psychological feedback, it almost makes finances game-like.” Mint studied the point systems of the Wi Fit and Warcraft when developing the new feature.

Do you use any strategies that make money management feel more like a game? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

This morning I appeared on the Today Show to discuss how the recession is changing household dynamics and responsibilities for breadwinning, child care and chores (video below). I was joined by DeAnna Starn and Seth Grossi, a married couple from Ohio who have a one-year-old son Nicolas. Since his layoff last fall, Seth has been taking care of the baby during the day and building a freelance business at night after DeAnna comes home from work.

Men have been stepping up to the plate in the last three decades as women have entered the workforce in greater numbers. During that time period, men doubled the amount of time spent on chores and tripled the time spent on childcare (although women still do more of both). Research has shown that the men who do the most are married to women who have more education, work more hours and earn more money.

But the trend has accelerated during in this recession, because 80 percent of the jobs lost since December 2007 have been lost by men – in industries like construction, finance and manufacturing. There’s also more income volatility in household incomes than three decades ago, so you see more couples trading off breadwinning. And technology plays an important role because it’s enabled both men and women to work from home more often.

Beyond the statistics, there’s the reality of making it work. Couples often have to confront the ideas they held about gender roles. One key to making it work is for women to avoid what sociologists call “gate-keeping.”

“We say we want them to be partners but we really want them to be unskilled assistants and we tell them how to do it,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History. “We do it in lots of little ways where we are undercutting their authority and expertise. If they turn a few pieces of underwear red or don’t dress the baby as neatly as we think she should be dressed that’s a small price to pay to let them develop their own expertise — and not think they are doing a job for a boss the boss being the woman.” (Coontz is a reformed gate-keeper – she no longer reloads the dishwasher after her husband had done the job.)

Coontz adds that there are lots of examples of true co-parenting across the income spectrum. She has studied blue-collar couples such as airline baggage handlers and factory workers, who alternate shifts so they can provide child care coverage around the clock.

Financially, one key to Seth and DeAnna’s success is that they track every penny of their spending. (They use an Excel spreadsheet that DeAnna built.) When you know exactly what’s coming in and where it’s going, it can help guide your decision making – you’ll know if one partner can afford to go back to school full-time, or if they should look for a job where their employer will reimburse part of their school tuition and they can attend part-time. You’ll know if you have a cushion for a few months to help one partner try to start a business. If you don’t know your inflow and outgo in detail it’s nearly impossible to make educated decisions – and that can mean digging yourself deeper in the hole, creating stress on the relationship.

Has the recession affected the roles in your household? How are you managing? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

I have been continually debating the causes of the subprime crisis with a good friend who spent two decades on Wall Street and whose moral and intellectual character I highly respect. Clearly it’s a multifaceted phenomenon that involved a great deal of greed and foolishness, which I summed up in this Yahoo!Finance column. (Although I regret that I failed to mention regulators who were asleep at the wheel and legislators who were in the pocket of the financial services industry, rather than watching out for consumers.)

But bottom line, my friend maintains that consumers are at fault. Yes, brokers, lenders, securitizers and investors were all involved. But people should simply have known better, she says. If they had not  signed documents they did not fully understand, if they had not taken out mortgages they could not afford when the rate readjusted, if they simply ignored the refinance offers piled up in their mailbox — none of this would have occurred. They should have known better.

I agree with her in part; I’m a big believer in caveat emptor. When we bought our home, we put 20 percent down (saved over a dozen years) and took out a 30-year, fixed-rate, 5.18% mortgage because we were fully cognizant of the risks of an adjustable-rate loan. There were too many unknowns — what if we couldn’t refinance when the rate adjusted? What if the price of our home declined? I wanted a payment I could be certain of over the long-haul. (I call it the Starbucks mortgage because if we both lost our jobs we could afford the payment by working as a baristas. Or bartenders. Maybe I should call it the Pub Mortgage.)

However, I believe that the subprime crisis is not simply a story of irresponsible and greedy Americans who bought five houses with no money down hoping to flip them. There was indisputably a great deal of fraud. For example, Ellen E. Schultz — my favorite investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal — exposes the story of some senior citizens who were defrauded during the subprime crisis (sub. may be req). It’s a tragic tale. 

That story (which should have run on A1 and not D1) needs to be told by more media. Because if this crisis goes down in history as a story of personal irresponsibility alone, we won’t as a nation make the regulatory changes that need to occur. (At minimum, mortgage brokers should be subject to the same suitability requirements that financial advisors are.)

If anything, the crisis demonstrates that a common sense outlook, a viewpoint that carefully weighs the worst-case scenario, that crunches all the numbers in detail, is essential to economic survival. (And sometimes even then, everything still comes crashing down.)

By the way, I feel the same about college tuition as I do about mortgages — there are too many unknowns in terms of our ability to get loans or scholarships. So we have been sacrificing elsewhere in our budget and saving since the kids were born to foot the bill for bachelor’s degrees in full. The Wall Street Journal recently did a piece (sub. may be req.) on how the kids of parents who can pay the tuition have regained their advantage in college acceptances. So if if this goal is important to you, and you haven’t started saving, it’s time to get going.

What do you think caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis? Is it a failure of individuals, institutions, government or a combination thereof? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

A new survey by Mainstreet.com names three Midwestern states tops in terms of financial happiness — Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas. Mainstreet’s “Happiness Index” ranked states according to household income, non-mortgage debt as a percentage of household income, employment and foreclosures. (It’s a new take on the old Misery Index, launched in the 1970s.)

My home state, New Jersey, ranked 29th; New York, where I spend a lot of time, ranked 14th. At the bottom: Oregon, troubled by high unemployment and foreclosures; read this recent Yahoo!Finance column for some background on the state, and one bank’s attempt to deal with the deflated housing market.

MainStreet.com general manager Harleen Kahlon told Good Morning America: “I think that on the coasts — in New York and California — we have a lot of people living beyond their means. But in the Midwest that’s often not the case. Maybe the takeaway is that living large is not the answer.” So maybe my Midwest roots (Illinois) inspired my live-within-your-means mantra. Actually, it was mostly my mom and my dad, who would have been 80 years old on April 6. Miss you Dad!

The authors of the recent book Spent ‘Til the End recommend Cedar Rapids (next door to Iowa City, where my sister lives — happily I might add) for people looking for the best living standard. Co-author Lawrence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economist, says Cedar Rapids’ low-cost environment provides a 78 percent higher standard of living than Seattle, and 34 percent higher than Tampa.

 Spend ’til the End advises consumers to “price their passions” — that is, calculate the living-standard effect before they get married, have many children, divorce, or move to a big city. “It’s important to make these choices ahead of time, to think about what really makes sense in terms of everything you want,” Kotlikoff told me, “because people do make critical, life-altering geographic decisions.”

Have you ever made a decision based on a passion and lived to regret it financially? Have you ever based a choice on a passion and had it turn out to be the best thing you ever did financially? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

When it comes to money and happiness, a feeling of financial security is just as important as income, at least for women. That’s the finding of a new study by Talya Miron-Shatz, a research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Well-Being.

Miron-Shatz recruited nearly 1,000 women of various ages and incomes to participate in two studies. Researchers asked a series of questions about major life topics, including relationships, work, finances, and overall well-being. Participants in the second study were asked to think and write about “the future” in an open-ended way.

Not surprisingly, women with higher incomes — those in the 75th percentile and above — reported more life satisfaction than those in the bottom 25th percentile. But feeling financially secure had the same effect: “When you trade off income for [secure] feelings, it raises life satisfaction to the same degree that a rise in income does,” Miron-Shatz says.

When asked about the future, 40 percent of respondents mentioned financial concerns — retirement, college tuition, making ends meet, etc. These participants reported lower life satisfaction than women who did not raise such concerns.

But remarkably, the study found that the sense of security someone enjoys — or the sense of foreboding she feels — has nothing to do with earnings, the complexity of finances, or even being in the red. Household income, homeownership status, age, and credit card debt did not predict whether or not a participant would include financial matters in her image of the future. The study was published in the February 25 issue of ‘Judgment and Decision Making’.

“I think the whole notion of security is becoming more prominent,” says Miron-Shatz. “Something is happening in America that hasn’t happened since the Great Depression — the notion that whatever it is I have may be insufficient, or is dwindling rather than increasing, and that is leading to a huge amount of anxiety.”

Clearly that anxiety can be just as potent for men. Miron-Shatz tells the story of a psychologist colleague whose patient was hospitalized with suicidal thoughts after losing half of his net worth — although he remained quite wealthy after the loss.

“He was not suicidal because he couldn’t go to the grocery store,” Miron-Shatz notes. “It’s that we are all accustomed to our way of life — whether it’s a motor home or a McMansion — and you don’t want it taken away from you. The prospect of losing that can be psychologically damaging. People value security as much as they value their actual assets.”

Miron-Shatz works with Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research in behavioral finance and hedonic psychology. Kahneman and several other researchers created the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), a tool to measure people’s daily quality of life by asking them to record their activities from the previous day in short diary form, as well as their feelings about the events.

Miron-Shatz was intrigued by the layer of thought and emotion not captured by the DRM. “You may be looking forward to a good friend’s visit, and she’s not coming until next week,” she explains. “You’re happy about it; but when you measure activities, you can’t capture that this is what’s making you happy, and not what you’re doing. I wanted to develop a study to capture this layer of thoughts throughout the day.”

Among those with money anxieties, 45 percent worried about finances in a generic way. More than a third focused on their financial well-being in retirement; as one respondent wrote, “I think about where I will spend my retirement years and will I have enough health and money to live a decent life.” Some 13 percent worried about job security and salaries; 11 percent were concerned about buying or renovating a home; and 10 percent mentioned supporting children and college tuition.

Participants “were worried about very realistic, down-to-earth things, not dreams of grandeur and trips to the Bahamas,” notes Miron-Shatz. Just 2 percent mentioned the cost of healthcare or health insurance (and only one respondent referred to the economic status of the country).

So how can people who fret about money feel more secure?

1. If the problem is real — too much debt or lack of savings — psychologists recommend “task-oriented coping.” Start by brainstorming a menu of strategies to achieve financial goals. Time-management expert and author Doug Sundheim has clients create a long list of everything they’re interested in having, putting them in categories such as work, family, health, etc.

Next, clients circle the goals they find most exciting, and write the words, “I could….” at the top of a page. Then they brainstorm 10 to 20 ways to pursue the objective, and begin testing different methods to achieve it. “One of the biggest reasons people never get out of the starting block is they’re afraid to experiment with ways to achieve their goals,” Sundheim says.

2. For people such as the suicidal wealthy man, lack of money itself is not the problem, so psychologists recommend “emotion-focused coping.” The idea is to communicate one’s feelings, with the goal of changing perspective on the stressful issue. Seeking social support helps. In her book ‘The How of Happiness’, psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky reports on a study that tracked down men and women whose spouses had died suddenly a year earlier.

“Perhaps not surprisingly, they found that the sudden death of spouses was related to an abrupt decline in their physical health,” she writes. “However, those widows and widowers who had confided to others close to them had fewer health problems and were less likely to ruminate about their situation.”

3. Try “avoidance coping,” which is something I turn to when reading stories about the potential impact of New Jersey’s budget woes on my property taxes — or other financial issues that are largely out of my personal control. Simply put, create a diversion: I take the dog for a walk, tackle a household chore, see what friends on Facebook are up to, or call one of my sisters. Research has found that volunteering is a surefire mood-booster, and for money-worriers, spending a morning at a food pantry might provide useful perspective.

4. Manage your aspirations. Money worries can come from falling short of some arbitrary ideal. If you think your children will not do well in life unless they graduate from Harvard, and paying that kind of tuition is impossible, it’s time to reframe your reality. And don’t compare yourself to people who can afford Harvard; there are many conduits to misery in life, but this one is a bullet-train.

Finally, don’t ruminate on losses. “Focusing on the past is the worst thing to do — you really have to move on,” says Miron-Shatz. Her own family experience is a case in point; in the 1940s her mother’s family fled Tunisia, which was occupied by the Nazis during World War II, leaving their hard-earned wealth behind. “She married my dad, went to nursing school, and lives in a small apartment,” says Miron-Shatz. “She never looked back. That’s the best thing to do — although it’s not easy.”

(Adapted from my Yahoo!Finance column)

Three federal agencies and state Attorneys General are cracking down on foreclosure fraud. There’s plenty of it following the announcement of President Obama’s $75 billion plan to help homeowners. If only we had had this level of attention during the sub-prime mortgage debacle. In an interview on Bill Moyers Journal this weekend, University of Missouri professor and author William Black noted that in 2004 the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly warned about “an epidemic of mortgage fraud, and if it was allowed to continue, it would produce a crisis at least as large as the Savings and Loan debacle.”

So why wasn’t anything done? After the 9/11 attacks, Black says, 500 white-collar crime specialists in the FBI (the folks who went after bad S&Ls in the early 90s) were moved to national terrorism duties. That’s understandable — except the Bush Administration refused to replace them. Virtually no one was watching the store as the mortgage industry — brokers, lenders, securitizers, investment bankers, ratings agencies — committed widespread fraud. You’ll also want to hear what Black has to say about Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Phil Gramm aligning to block Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating derivatives. (Other news reports say Alan Greenspan and Arthur Levitt also opposed Born.) Why are Rubin and Summers still advising President Obama? Can we sweep the rascals out already? How about having Born replace Summers? Click here to watch the interview.

While you’re at it, listen to this interview on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, with Frank Partnoy, former derivatives trader at Morgan Stanley and author of Fiasco: Blood in the Water on Wall Street. The book was just reissued in paperback (and out of stock on Amazon). It’s a clear-eyed examination of what de-regulation run amok looks like.

I recently interviewed Robert Manning, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Credit Card Nation, about a wide range of scams. (I followed up on my March 19 post about the “Card Services” fraudsters in this Yahoo!Finance column, exposing how the scam works.)

Manning told me he’s seeing a couple different version of the foreclosure rescue scams. Watch out for services that demand an upfront fee to process your application for foreclosure relief. “Some companies are charging $300 a pop just to talk to someone over the phone,” he says. “The consumer really needs to be engaged with the service that’s being offered so they understand what it is the firm can do and what they can’t do. Are they simply collecting information and passing it on to someone else, who passes it on to someone else?” Someone seeking foreclosure relief should be engaged with the decision-maker he says. See this information from the Center for Responsible Lending to avoid scams and click here to find a certified housing counselor in your area.

If you’ve been scammed, tell your story and help warn others. You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

I’ve been writing about money and happiness, and the positive psychology movement, for the last six years. It’s clearly become a hot topic over the decade, with books by leading academics such as Dan Ariely, Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Daniel Gilbert, Richard Layard, Sonja Lyubomirsky,  Martin Seligman, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, to name just a few. (I’ve read them all and reviewed most in my Yahoo!Finance column.)

As cultural trends tend to move in cycles, I’ve been thinking it may be high time for a backlash. For instance, a Happiness book by Daniel Goleman and Matthieu Ricard is subtitled “A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill” – a declaration that might leave the naturally morose feeling a big inept. Here’s a hint of what’s likely to come, summed up in a hilarious piece by British writer Hannah Betts in the U.K. Telegraph: “The Pursuit of Happiness is Driving Me to Despair.” A fun read to launch the weekend.

Is the pursuit of happiness driving you to despair? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

I co-hosted a Blogger Briefing this week on behalf of Kodak for a group of influential mom bloggers. I shared some savings tips (see previous post) and then asked for their ideas. As I expected, they had some terrific ones. Here are just a few quick highlights:

-Heather from LittleMissKnowItAll.com suggested dumping Netflix or other movie-by-mail services in favor of RedBox, where you can get first-run movies for $1 a night. (There are 12,000 locations, including one right in front of my local grocery store, so I’m planning to give it a try.) Heather adds that RedBox often promotes codes online for a free movie to get consumers to try the service, so do a Yahoo search (or check her site for the codes).

-Nicole from Mom Trends, whose blog focuses on style, just redecorated a nursery by throwing a bright splash of color on just one wall (requiring one can of paint rather than three) and using wall decals rather than expensive wallpaper. She also recommends repurposing artwork — the most expensive part of framing is the frame and the glass, she points out. Remove a tired print, buy a new mat and frame pictures of the kids.

-Nicole also recommends finding a food co-op in your area to save on groceries; she belongs to one of the nation’s largest — the Park Slope Food Co-op, which has 14,000 members. You have to volunteer a few hours a month, but Nicole says the savings are worth it! To search for a co-op near you, click here.

-Amy from Selfishmom.com says giving an allowance to her four- and seven-year-old saves money. The kids know that certain treats — such as the ice cream from the truck jingling its way up the street — have to be paid for out of their personal stash. (I’ve also found giving kids control of their own purse strings also cuts down on the “Mom, can I have….” every time you walk into Target.)

-Marcy of The Glamorous Life Association is a big fan of bartering. She trades advertising on her blog for kids’ services, getting a 50 percent discount on her son’s Tae Kwon Do class and free entertainment for one of her kid’s birthday parties. “They were thrilled with the trade,” she says. “It never hurts to ask!”

-As for family vacations, Christine from FromDatestoDiapers just took her six kids to Las Vegas for the week. Rent a unit that has a mini-kitchen, or at least request a microwave, she advises. (Some hotels send them to the room, just as they’d send an extra cot.) Buying cereal and muffins for breakfast and packing snacks while touring saves on the budget; click here for her funny observations on the trip. 

We usually rent a condo and buy groceries on vacation, but Katja from Skimbacolifestyle offered an idea I hadn’t heard before: If you bring food from home, freeze a case of juice boxes and put them in the bottom of the cooler. Her family travels everywhere by car, and she swears this keeps the food in the cooler cold for three days.

Thanks to all the mom bloggers who participated in the briefing for their tips! I would love to hear your tips as well. You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

(Full disclosure: I am the spokesperson for Kodak’s Print & Prosper campaign. However, Kodak did not pay for this post, I just really liked these ideas. M&H.com does not accept payment for posts.)