Has anyone here used this service? It tracks your spending on a daily basis to help you budget and see where your money is actually going, but it has to create a connection with your bank and credit card accounts which I am naturally hesitant to do. It is recommended by Money Magazine and it’s TOS says it only has read only status and is secure.
Can I trust this?
I use it and haven’t had any adverse issues with it. What I like about it is that I can tie all my accounts together and keep track of all my credit and debit and retirement accounts. It even figures out my net worth. It can find trends on my spending and savings, etc. You can set up budgets, etc and so you can track how you are spending your money.
The only downside I have seen is on the tracking side----if you designate something to be tracked as say ‘southwest’ is ‘air travel’ it tends to put anything that has ‘southwest’ in the title under that moniker even if it makes no sense. So you do have to monitor the catagories. But if you do that weekly it really isnt’ a big deal and you can get a good sense of where your money is going.
As much as I hate “me too” posts, I agree with everything Hakuna Matata said above. I’ve been using Mint for quite some time now, and have had no problems with them having my bank account info. Everything is charted and graphed for you, and they make it really easy to monitor trends in your spending.
I’ll break the me tooism with a dissenting opinion. I tried it for a while and found it to be more trouble than it was worth.
I have a lot of accounts (several each of bank/credit union accounts, brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, then mortgages, etc.). All but two of those accounts have had at least one problem during the 6 months or so I used Mint. Several of them had repeating problems. For example, my credit union account needed to be “fixed” (meaning completely re-entering my credentials including secret questions) at least once every couple of weeks. Almost none of them worked for more than a month or two without breaking. I ended up with two copies of one of my brokerage accounts showing up. Neither had the right balance. Same with a credit card account (except one of those did have the right balance – the other didn’t).
I had a mortgage with Countrywide, who was purchased by Bank of America. When it transitioned, the Countrywide version stayed, with the old balance, and a new one showed up under B of A. So it looked like I had almost twice as much mortgage debt as I actually do. Now, this is a complicated situation, and I could give them some leeway. However, this involves two of the largest financial institutions in the country. Surely a very large number of Mint customers have accounts with them. There was months of warning. The whole point of Mint is that you’re not supposed to have to manually screw with things – enter your info once and it’s supposed to work. They could have handled this transition a lot more smoothly.
Things were miscategorized for me all the time. I tried for about three months to be diligent about fixing them, but it never really died down. Every week, there were still more things I had to fix. In one egregious example, I made a large wire transfer and the description had the word “book” in it (I forget exactly what it said). Mint categorized that as “books” and then sent me an alert that there had been a purchase of books for $XXXXXX and if I wasn’t expecting it I should check with my bank. Obviously, I about crapped my pants before I recognized the amount and realized what had happened. Not once did it send me an alert about something that was actually helpful (most of them were correct, but things I’d already known about anyway).
I’ll grant that most people I’ve talked to about it haven’t had problems on nearly that scale. Either I’m unlucky, or I have a weird combination of circumstances that make it not work well for me.
Beyond that, I found that their usage model just doesn’t fit very well with the way I manage my money. It shows me what has happened in the past, but not what’s coming up. There’s no way to enter pending transactions like checks (though I think they may have recently added that or announced that they would; I haven’t been paying close attention). I know that this is probably going overboard, but I go through all of my accounts and manually enter transactions from the statements (usually online) into Quicken, and then balance them to the penny. If there’s a discrepancy, I don’t quit until I’ve tracked it down. I don’t even use the automatic data downloading features – I find that manually entering the transactions forces me to really pay attention to what’s happening, and I always very quickly notice if something strange happens. I want to have pending transactions there so I can immediately know exactly where I stand.
If I’m going to do all of that manual management, I don’t find that Mint really brings a lot of additional value – I’m intimately familiar with where my money is going, and how much I have where. The graphs are pretty, and if it didn’t have the hassles of the accounts breaking and miscategorized transactions, I may have continued looking at it periodically. But as it is, it’s not worth the trouble for me.
Obviously, YMMV.
I use it, and agree with both the good and the bad reviews so far.
When it works, it’s really great. You can see where your money goes really easily, and it tracks things almost effortlessly. I’ve gotten better at money management using it.
However… it’s buggy. And when it doesn’t work, it’s really frustrating. It’s doubled my accounts more than once (every transaction listed twice.) It’s kind of dumb about alerts - you know, I really don’t care if I went 10 cents over my Gas budget this month, please don’t send me worried text messages about it.
It totally stopped updating my main checking account once for several weeks. The support was useless, they just kept saying “we’re aware of the problem and are working on it.” I ended up “fixing” it by accidentally deleting the account - losing six months worth of data - and setting it up again. When I asked about getting my lost data back, they said “too bad.”
Once they fix the bugs, it’ll be great. But for now, I don’t use it as much as I did before I found all the bugs. Especially the one where I lost all my transactions, that was a real bummer.