I’m thinking of signing up with mint.com so my wife and I can get an all-in-one view of our money, so we can (finally) plan more intelligently.
If you use mint.com, do you recommend it? Any anecdotes, tips, warnings?
Thanks in advance,
E.
I always seem to have to fix the logins, so I stopped messing with it. I use Quicken.
I tried using it about a year and a half ago.
It was an interesting idea that I had hoped would work but doesn’t quite live up to its expectations.
First, you’ve got to plug in all the information (logins, etc) from pretty much every credit card/bank you own, which means you’re putting your entire portfolio into one website and someone on the other end could have access to it. That’s a lot of trust to place in Mint upfront.
Second, it would place every purchase of yours into distinct categories such as groceries or gas or restaurants or bills. It was a good guesser, but not perfect. So if it thought a trip to the gas station was a trip to the grocery store (and if you even noticed it did that), you’d have to manually alter what type of establishment it was. If the entire point is to determine how and where you spent your money and it’s automatically off by 10%, it really doesn’t do much good.
On the flip side, if I did go through and ensure that each and every entry is correctly placed…well, what’s the point? Why am I putting this much effort into a process that’s supposed to be automated? I should just create my own spreadsheet that keeps track in even more detail and be done with it.
Second part b: So if I take a trip to Target and spend $300 in one fell swoop, $75 on groceries, $50 on pets, and $175 on household, how do I track that in Mint? IIRC, I can’t do that. So again, it’s gotta put it in some category. Does your grocery budget go completely out of whack this month? So what’s the point?
After about six months I stopped using it. Mint keeps texting my wife every Friday evening and we laugh when we hear that ding because it’s Mint yelling "for God’s sake, come back. Please! Or at least don’t spend so much this weekend! I miss you. "
Same here.
Oddly enough, there’s an article on CNN.com about Mint.com written by the CEO of a failed competor (Wesabe): Why my company lost to Mint.
For those of us lucky enough to be members of the best company on Earth (USAA), they have a similar Money Manager tool that does the same thing as Mint (probably better, but I haven’t used Mint so I can’t say for sure). Of course, USAA is an exceptional case, so I trust them a lot more than I would any other company.
I’ve used it for a couple of years. It’s pretty good for tracking accounts and past spending, but falls short of being a killer app for a few reasons:
– Glitchy logins to banks, I’m always reverifying passwords and security questions.
– Poor budget planning options
– Poor investment or income planning, i.e. it won’t show you how long to pay off your credit card or compare debt reduction plans.
– No way to run or export good reports or projections
Some good points:
– Maintenance-free (except when fixing login glitches)
– Good categorization options
– Good quick pie charts and graphs of your past spending that you can click and drill down into.
I tried it but was vaguely annoyed because it kept misclassifying my purchases. Something else annoyed me, but I can’t completely remember what it was.
Anyway, the point is: I don’t want to have to sit there all day writing out what each debit purchase is- it’s a time waster.
Thanks for the helpful comments so far (& please keep 'em coming!).
One question about the interface: those of you with joint finances, did you and your spouse have to set up the mint.com account together (thereby having to coordinate upfront)? Or do you each set up your own mint.com account (thereby having to enter all your $$-account info twice)?
I used to use Microsoft Money but when that went defunct I switched to Mint. Generally speaking it was OK but the fact that it lacks a function to reconcile transactions made it pretty much useless to me. It’s useful to see your bank info, but not very useful to actually verify and confirm things.
I use mint.com to keep track of our net worth. I don’t pay attention to the alerts (“Oh noes! You were charged a fee by a big, bad bank!”) or the budgeting tools. It’s just an easy way to see all of our accounts in one place.
I do wish it allowed more control over the data it collects. For example, it has our HELOC categorized as a credit card. They acknowledge that that’s a bug but there’s no way to change it. You can’t add assets that you don’t have online accounts for, so I have to remember to add in the savings bonds and shares of stock we hold as certificates.
They never fix anything.
There are parts of the mint.com system that are just flat out broken. There’s no good way to report a bug or problem, just a user bulletin board. And it seems that the company would rather add features than fix the product flaws.
I did find it less annoying than Quicken.
I don’t use it (yet), but there was a Quick and Dirty podcast by Money Girl (Laura Adams) discussing it back in July.
A link to the Money Girl page is http://moneygirl.quickanddirtytips.com/the-best-apps-for-personal-finances.aspx
She also mentioned a similar, competitor’s program called Pageonce. Maybe if you don’t like Mint.com you will prefer them.
If think Mint works fine for just general financial picture stuff but if you were using it for more detailed financial work I think it has some issues.
But I like the site, it allows me to see all my financial info in one spot and I can easily keep track of my net worth and know where my overall debt and cash flow is going. For that high level type of information I think is a great site.
I initially started it by myself and liked it, so eventually I added my joint accounts with my wife and then her accounts. There are some assets I have (such as a piece of property) that they can’t link to, so you have to manually input that info in, but I am fine with that. But for 95% of our assets such as mortgages, 401k and other retirement plans, credit cards, etc I find it very easy to use.
The budget stuff, etc I don’t care for much. There isn’t a huge amount of flexability in it. Someone upthread asked about purchases such as clothes purchased say with groceries. You can break down each purchase into individual amounts but you have to do it manually–which makes sense as mint only has access to the overall charge from the store. But if you wanted to break it down you can. Also the issue of the site miscatagorizing charges–for the most part it identifies the bank, credit card, store, restuarant, etc but not always. But once you identify say Bob’s Toadstool Grill as a Restaurant, it usually always recognizes it as a Restaurant. However if it shows up from the credit card one time as Bob’s Grill instead of Bob’s Toadstool Grille it might not recognize it and will mislable it. But I don’t see how that could be avoided.
So overall it is a good tool for a quick overall financial picture but like any tool it has it’s limitations.
Seconding this, and adding that you don’t have to be a fully qualified member (ie, active or retired military or family member) to open a bank account.