By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

TechCrunch reports that Mint, which won the TechCrunch40 event for new startups in 2007, has released a major upgrade to its personal money management website. Already awash in over $5 million in investor financing, the Mountain View, CA-based startup announced on its company blog yesterday that users can now track investment portfolios.

I’ve used Mint for a while. It’s amazingly simple. The only drawback or concern I have is that it’s a little scary to hand the keys to your various financial accounts over to a relatively green (no pun intended) tech outfit.

When you sign up with Mint, in order to reap the full benefits of usership you must grant it access via your username and password to whatever financial institution account online that you want it track – your bank, your credit card company, your 401(k), etc.

You can’t pay bills (yet) or make deposits or withdrawals to accounts on Mint (yet), but the company says it hopes to implement those features someday.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer says that the feature most often requested by users – and now available – is the ability to define your own transaction categories. No longer hampered by Mint’s limited set of descriptions, Mint users can set up customized rules on how to define their gains and losses.

Have you tasted Mint? Do you find it fresh or stale?