Mint.com Review: Personal Finance Manager
I signed up for Mint.com, a personal finance manager, and I thought I’d post my reactions here. First, let’s walk through the process. You fill in your email address and passwords, and then almost immediately begin filling in sign-in information for the online banking service you use. The GUI is fast and intuitive:
Within minutes, Mint has pulled the most recent 132 transaction from four credit cards, a checking account, and paypal. They support hundreds of different accounts, from banking checking and savings, credit cards, macys and other store cards, as well as investment accounts. In the near future, they will support student loan accounts as well!
Yes, this is scary, but Mint claims they can keep you safe by not storing your banking login information themselves:
We ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but we do not see or store that information. That means no one at Mint, and no potential hackers of Mint.com, can access your banking credentials. Your online banking credentials are stored only with these institutions enabling Mint to automatically and securely update your transactions and saving you from updating, syncing or uploading financial information manually. All communication between Mint and its online financial service providers is encrypted using 128–bit SSL encryption, the financial industry standard for data protection.
The next step is to classify and review your transactions. Mint lets you put them in buckets–and naturally it will get a few wrong to start with–but you can set up rules to classify new transactions how you like. For example, I set one that sets any cheques with the amount of my rent to go into the rent bucket:
By doing this, you let them do some analysis on your spending or earning trends. Note, the trends feature appears to update daily, not in real time, so if you classify a bunch of transactions, it won’t update the trends page with your new categorization for some time. This is unfortunate, but probably necessary. This lets them make, say, a graph of your spending v.s. the average NY spender:
I guess I need to spend more money at Amazon and Best Buy to fit in these days. Lastly, there is their “ways to save” page, which is basically targeted affiliate ads with various banks. This is their revenue stream–getting you to sign up for new credit cards and open new accounts–so don’t trust anything it says:
The verdict? I love it, and I think it’s only going to get better. This is the new world, and services like Mint can make our lives infinitely easier! Please share your opinions about Mint.com, if you’ve ever experienced fraud after signing up, etc, below.
Update: There are some good reviews out there, too. PC Magazine says “Mint.com is a useful, intelligent, and free financial Web service that’s simple to set up and tracks your monetary life with little intervention on your part,” while Viewpoints has a single review which calls it “One of the best free money trackers on the Internet” and Girls Just Wanna Have Funds praises it for costing $50 less than MS Money.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 pm and is tagged with personal finance manager, financial service providers, store cards, loan accounts, banking service, investment accounts, categorization, buckets, ssl encryption, cheques, checking account, mint, credentials, credit cards, financial information, student loan, passwords, hackers, real time, institutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on July 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
I don’t understand how they can get updated information from your banks without storing that data. For that matter, giving away your login credentials is probably a violation of the terms of use for most banks (just like it is for e-mail services but other sites ask for them).
on July 3rd, 2008 at 6:20 am
They use a service called Yodlee which does the access. You can google it for more info!
on July 6th, 2008 at 11:54 am
After reading your review, I figured I’d try it out… I am quite impressed with the way it generated my expense report. For someone that uses their debit card for everything, Mint will help you find where you are spending to much! Great review Elliot.
on July 7th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
So, it looks like Yodlee stores the data then? I’m still not sure I like the idea of someone else having my banking login information, but maybe I’m just paranoid.
Side note - you should consider getting the subscribe to comments plugin [1] for wordpress. Otherwise I have to remember to come back and see if you replied to my comment, which is never a safe bet.
[1] txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
on July 8th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Finally looked at mint myself, and wow. I think I’d be willing to pay money for the service it provides.
on July 21st, 2008 at 6:43 am
Like Shown i don’t feel safe to give my bankin information. I just try Mint and it’s not really simple to use. So now i have tried 3 others websites: Wesabe.com ; sbudget.com and MyBudget-online.com
Wesabe and MyBudget-online.com are more friendly for everybody.
on August 6th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
I tried to setup an account at mint.com but I found out that citibank and ING did not support the mint site/ software. what to do, what to do?…. could someone suggest another software that is better?
on August 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Pat, I have mint and it works fine with my ING account, which includes two saving accounts and an ING Electric Orange account.
on August 20th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
I am really impressed with Mint.com. I signed up today, and within just 20 minutes, I had all my transactions categorized and could easily see where all my money was going… I highly suggest this service, its is SUPERIOR to everything else I have tried!!!!!
Go mint.com!