Getting Started – Review of the Mint.com Signup Process

I’ve been using it for a while and I like the transactions feature. It’s easy to review all purchases from multiple credit cards.

I also like the investments feature. I can easily see how our combined accounts are growing (mine’s Fidelity, his is Charles Schwab).

The only problems I’ve had are with student loans. One loan connects fine, one loan used to connect, but no longer does, so holds an old balance from months ago, and the last loan is not compatible with Mint so it doesn’t show up. Not a huge deal though since I know exactly what’s going on with them. I’m more concerned about tracking my credit cards.

all mint is is a fancy front end for yodlee that uses your purchase info for marketing and making $.

if you like mint and don’t like people all in your biz and profitting off that info, go straight to the source and use yodlee.

I’ve been using Mint for 1.5 years with my investment accounts (Vanguard) with 0 problems. It’s clearly a problem with the connection between Mint and Fidelity, not with the Investments feature itself. I’m surprised you pan a feature so outright when clearly many many people manage to use it (with non-Fidelity accounts) with no problems.

And you can thank me for your credit union being on there! I and a lot of other people sent frequent messages to both Mint and credit unions when Mint was trying to win them over so they could sync accounts with CUs too. It took more than a year! But now I am back on Mint with my little CU and totally happy.

This year, I’ve tried out Mint, Moneydance, Yodlee, HelloWallet, YNAB, Mvelopes, and several others. I bought Quicken 2011, and it’s just as cumbersome as I feared. Mint is good, no doubt – but offers practically no way to project future transactions and balances.

The one I’m settling on is BudgetTracker.com. For $3.95 a month, it has nearly as much functionality as Quicken – in some ways, MORE. No, it doesn’t automatically link to accounts, but you can download the transactions and reconcile them easily. It’s very intuitive, and basically works the way my mind works.

Additionally, it’s web based, with mobile app, which was what really prompted my search for software, in the first place. I’ve kept my Mint and Yodlee accounts open – they’re good! But I think BudgetTracker is where I’ll ultimately settle.

JD,

I’ve used Mint since 2008, about two years now. It doesn’t allow access to all my accounts, but it definately helps me track where I spend my money and when it shows me student loan and car loan debt every time I log on, it reminds me of my goals to pay them off. It definately eases and uncertainty I may have about my cash.

I’ve been using mint for 2 years now, and it is a core part of how I manage my money.

As other commentators have mentioned, the trends section is very very powerful and provides great information about current performance compared to last month, last year, or the nice option to look at trends over any period(s) of time.

I have also experienced some of the same problems other people faced. Initially I had some trouble connecting some accounts to Mint. Eventually they get resolved. Apparently any time a company changes how their website/interface works, mint may have to also fix things on their end. Since Mint connects to hundreds (thousands?) of institutions, you can see how it might not always get fixed within 24 hours.

After 2 years though I think it’s only happened to two of my accounts (fidelity and ING) over that time period. This isn’t bad since it is all of my wife’s accounts as well as my own.

We have: Our Bank checking account, Bank savings account, ING account, my etrade roth ira account, my etrade brokerage account, employer 401k, wife’s 403b, wife’s pension account, wife’s vanguard roth ira, our mortgage and 3 shared credit card accounts. Mint makes keeping track of all of this pretty easy.

I do my month end review of our finances and make sure each line item is in the right category, and that there’s no weird/unauthorized purchases, etc. This is also when my wife and I ask each other what we are spending our money on and there’s no surprises or secret large ticket purchases without the other’s consent.

But the BEST about mint is the budget. I set my budget to include all monthly fixed expenses and regular variable expenses, and little buffers for random expenses. The trends data helps me make sure that my variable expense estimates are realistic. Now I can always track how well I’m sticking to the budgetary plan.

But The real value to budgets though is in using the mobile phone app. NOW YOU CAN SEE IN REAL TIME HOW MUCH IS LEFT IN YOUR ASSORTED BUDGETS! (e.g. how much left in groceries, or personal allwoance, or eating out budget, etc). You never have to wonder ‘do I have enough’ ever again.

Now the caveat here is that it relies heavily on you using electronic payment for things (i.e. credit cards). Which works well for me. I use a card for about every transaction. It gets automatically recorded, I earn cash back (or points), and I don’t have to worry about getting robbed, or losing a wallet with cash in it. We pay our cards off in full each month so this is what works for us. (sidenote: if you didn’t pay it off in full, mint can show you how much your paying in interest and fees, and what percent of your income it is, etc).

In summation, I heartily endorse mint.

I’ve been using Mint for a while and I love it. It is quirky here and there, but I have been able to iron out almost all the issues. A few of my experiences with Mint:

First, as for getting accounts updating that don’t work at first. The previously mentioned changing passwords on both ends can help. Also, try searching for the name of your bank and try a few different results. For example, there’s several account types that come up for “Fidelity.” I’ve had cases where the one I thought I needed didn’t work, but a different Fidelity account type did work.

Some sites also have a setting to allow third party software to access it; it will deny anything it detects as coming from an automatic service like Mint. This is usually disabled by default for security. You may have to dig a little on your bank’s site to find this setting, if it is there.

Second, talk to Mint! I sent them an email about Prosper accounts not calculating balances correctly (only showing remaining note balance and not cash in the account, so your account would appear to be decreasing in value over time), and they fixed it about a week later. Though, I and many other people have complained about the Goals feature not letting you count anything but credit cards as “debt,” and there has been no action there.

To the people worried about security: Mint is pretty safe. You can read specifics here, http://www.mint.com/privacy/, but from someone with a Network Security background I can tell you that your info is much safer with Mint than it is going to and from your house on paper.

One last note, JD, you mention looking forward to the automated alerts when certain conditions are met. You should be aware Mint is not constantly monitoring your accounts, so if your balance dips below a certain amount, you may not get alerted for several days until Mint syncs on its own. I find that if I don’t log in, Mint tends to automatically sync about once every day or two, and this is when an alert would be generated.

I found that I was only getting alerts when I was sitting at my computer logging into Mint, as I log in more often than it syncs on its own. For this reason, I disabled the alerts, as they didn’t benefit me.

Hope this info will be helpful to someone!

I’ve used Mint for about seven month’s and it’s absolutely fantastic. No investment problems (I have Vanguard, though, not Fidelity), but I have had problems connecting to our car loan (no preaching, it’s before my frugal stage), so I had to set it up as an “other item” and I manually change it each month when I send in the payment.

One word of advice, though. I wanted to delete our old bank from appearing on the main page as we’ve recently switched to a new bank. I went throught the delete process, but realized it also deletes all your history when you do that!!! It’s like starting over, now! The Mint people said it’s a bug and there is nothing they can do about it. I suggested putting a warning that says your history will be deleted, as I thought I was just deleting the account.

I have been using Mint for a couple years now, and find the “Trend” tab the most useful. While I do have a pretty detailed budget in place, my actual spending frequently varies from what I have budgeted. That was one of the reasons I started using Mint in the first place – to see what I was “doing wrong” from a budgeting standpoint. I don’t use cash much, mostly my debit card, so I can literally track every penny that I spend. I then copy each month’s totals onto a spreadsheet, for which I have some total and average formulas set up to even better help me see where my money is going. It also gives me a lot of leverage during the financial conversations my partner and I have. I can concretely and accurately show where my money went at any given point!

JD – when you do your follow-up post, I have a suggestion for it. Break the posts down by the sections in Mint – ie, spending, budgeting, goals, etc. I would love to hear how others are using the budgeting and goal ones in particular, and would help all of us really make the best use out of the site. The “goals” one is a relatively new feature, if I recall correctly, and I know I’m not using it to its full potential. How would others feel about that – please comment!

oh, one more point about the account accessibility issues…my student loan and brokerage accounts are not able to connect to/with Mint on a regular basis. For the student loan account, I think it’s due to the same reason others have previously said – with Mint not being able to answer the security question. For my brokerage account, well, they have pretty kick-(butt) security with their site, and I think they may be intentionally blocking Mint and other third-party sites like it from accessing their customer’s accounts. Quite honestly I’m not bothered by either one of these issues. I pop out to my student loan servicer’s site on a regular basis; same with my brokerage account. What I am mostly concerned with is tracking my actual spending – and the site does a truly fabulous job in that regard.

I’ve been using Mint for a while now and while the Fidelity integration is not perfect, my accounts came over. My Ing investments have not integrated, but overall I like the ease of having my full financial picture in one location.

I think they will continue to make improvements and it will only get better.

I think it’s a great tool and I’m much more in tune to my spending and saving then ever before.
Good luck and keep us posted on your experience.
-E

I’ve looked at Mint, but I just can’t get comfortable with the idea of giving a third party access to my financial information; I’d prefer a desktop app. After doing a lot of research, I’ve decided to go with Moneydance.

I notice you mention being tempted by Moneydance in your “Good-Bye, Microsoft Money!” post– would love to see an updated post if you’ve tried or thought about it since then!

I’ve been using Mint for a while (year and a half? Two years?), and while I love it, I swear it has gotten more glitchy since they got bought out. I can’t prove it, but I only started having issues after Intuit bought them.

I used to have a budget for every single expenditure, but I discovered that my spending just isn’t that predictable. So instead, I make a budget for the known amounts–mortgage, HOA, Netflix, etc.–and then just let the rest of it go into the “everything else” budget. It makes it easy to see if my overall spending is on track without having to budget for each category.

I keep discovering more useful features. For instance, you can use “add transaction” to enter a check’s information when you write it, rather than wait for it to be cashed. I also like the tags; I have all my charitable donations tagged, so I’ll be able to easily pull them up at tax time. It’s not perfect, but it’s still great.

Response to #7 – Gail

I prefer YNAB too especially over Mint. To me Mint is more of an automatic everything is there type of account. I like the old school method of entering all my receipts and “balancing” my account.

Plus I like it that I don’t have to share all my financial information, log-ins, passwords, etc with one particular online site. I’m sure it’s safe and secure, but if hackers can get into highly secured government sites, I’m sure they could get into Mint’s site if they wanted to.

I keep getting tempted to switch to Mint because I like the ease of everything being there and maybe after verifying a receipt was entered correctly, but I still don’t like the idea that maybe a few unauthorized transactions could slip in without me noticing it.

tried Mint once, thought it would be cool. i guess it is, but it really freaked me out that all my info was online for them to try to sell to me. i keep a spreadsheet that i’ve evolved over time, that tracks all my expenses by category, my cash by category, my c/c accounts my net worth. I plug my investments into Google, so I can track those and just enter at the end of every month the balance of them into my net worth. And yes, that’s online, but it’s not giving any sensitive info, just the date, purchase price, commission and security. it’s the only “by hand” category i have, everything else is hooked up to something else so it’s all automatic. every day i go into my online banking, and tie out the bank balance with my spreadsheet. i guess it’s a lot of work but like i said I evolved it over time, and now i have an at-a-glance picture of everything and it’s on my computer, not online. I’m not really a spreadsheet wiz, i just know the basics.

JD

I think I know why your fidelity accounts dont work with Mint.

It is because fidelity has a same feature that mint has, which aggregates information from all your other bank accounts.

Since fidelity feature regarding account aggregation competes directly with Mint, Fidelity does not allow requests from Mint.

I’ve been using mint for about 2 years now. I had trouble keeping up with quicken and excell. This seems to be the perfect balance. I log in every morning to check for anything fishy and update categories and notes while I still remember what it was for.
-Its really helped me curb eating out and alcohol purchases. If you don’t track you don’t care.
-There were sometimes that I found it very limiting, like when I bought a house the down payment counts as an expense, talk about throwing your budgets off.
-I have all my accounts and assets tracked so I have an accurate net worth, but at my point in life my net worth is more volatile than it should be. (stocks are my largest asset)
-It glitches, sometimes I can’t sync, sometimes it miscategorizes, and my homes value seems to be estimated a little high.
All in all, glad I found it and use it, less work is better.

It sounds to me like Mint would make sense if your finances are complex.

What I don’t seem to understand is a response to the first part of the post where you discuss a connection to all of someones accounts.

Why would someone have alot of accounts that they need to track. If they were on financial track that is.

Think about it. Should you be tracking your investment accounts, 401(k)’s, 403(b)’s etc on such a constant regular basis that an automated program becomes necessary. Probably not. If you feel the need to know the balance of investment accounts every day or so the market is probably not the place for you.

And credit cards? I have said before that credit cards are a waste of time so if you don’t use them, there are no accounts to track.

So that leaves debts. If you have your debts under control or paid off, then you should have very few if any to track as well. And those are really only tracked once per month, and can be tracked with the monthly statement.

So that leaves what…checking. Doesn’t your online bank account have all the info you could ever need.

My point is for those that keep their finanical life simple, there is little use for something like this. And typically people who keep it simple have a lot to keep.

“Though I fully embrace the Internet Age, I’m still wary of giving one service access to all of my accounts.”

This is the single reason why I haven’t adopted Mint. Also, I have 7 years of data in my Quicken files so that comes in handy to see where I’ve come from financially.

I feel like having my accounts/passwords in Quicken on my single computer is more secure than a large site like Mint which would be a more attractive target for hackers (more accounts at hand if they do get in).

Also, I like to be protective about my data, and as Mint has shown they will use it to their benefit and even make it public, with their roll-ups of who spends what and where on http://data.mint.com

As much as I want to move into the 21st century with my financial data and be able to access it all in one spot on the web, I can only find more reasons against doing so than for.

Is Mint worth it if you already own Quicken?

People are right about the security of Mint. If they did get cracked, it is possible someone could get your bank account password and use that to log into your bank directly and transfer money. “Encrypting” does help but is not a total solution – for Mint to use your password they have to be able to decrypt it into plain text and send it to your bank. So there is always going to be some way for a hacker to get that password in plain text, too.

Decent web sites use a different method for storing passwords. Even your bank does not actually know your password; what they do is “hash” it which is like encryption but one-way. They store the hash in their systems. Every time you enter your password, they hash it and compare the hash to what they have in their system.

I have used Mint for a couple of years. I used to love it, but lately I have been getting really frustrated with it.

My ING accounts no longer sync up, period, all hope abandoned. Complaining about it has gotten zero response. Worse, my credit union account (my everyday checking!) has started failing to sync regularly and it seems to be getting worse. Add to that the fact that a couple of my accounts (mortgage lender, retirement fund) have never been in their database and requests that they be added were ignored. And the goals tool is totally wonky for me.

My credit union has started offering a similar product called FinanceWorks (powered by Quicken) and I have started using that. It doesn’t have quite as user-friendly an interface as Mint, but it’s more reliable in the data-gathering.

We’ve used Mint off and on for three years. We’re using it right now.

Here’s my overal impression: When it works, it’s nice but limited in features and customozability. When it doesn’t work, it’s utterly useless.

And it often doesn’t work. Syncing issues and institution incompatibility have plagued us from the start, including both a credit union and a bank. Sync will work for a while, then…boom, broken. A perusal of Mint forums almost always show a lot of other users with the same problems.

And that’s a good place to spend 20 minutes–the forums. Mint is not robust, and is largely unreliable. Pretty? Yes. A handful of nifty features? Yes, when they work.

Unfortunately, we haven’t found a web-based tool we like better, and we’d really like to abandon the desktop app model for tracking our finances.

I tried Mint (once for about five minutes), and I’m just not sure it’s what I’m looking for. I really would like an account tracking thing that will allow me to pre-schedule all my reoccurring transactions. My paycheck isn’t the same every week, but the money that I have deducted from it is, and I would like to know on Thursday (when I get paid) how much money I’ll have left over for the week.

I’ve been using Mint for 6 months, and really love it. The problem is my girlfriend has issues with their (lack of) security, and there is really nothing I can do to get around the fact that they list all of your sensitive data in one spot. You can guess a password as many times as you want without it stopping you (bad thing imo). I really like Mint, but I wish they did more to ensure our security and make it public how they do that.

Love Mint. Cool look, great little tweaky features, great weekly emails — but doesn’t deliver the total package. My ING Direct accounts STILL won’t load, and I’ve been trying for two years. Forget the stock accounts. For someone tracking and trying to build total networth — this is a FAIL.

I checked Google Insights and found that Quicken and Mint were two of the top talked about issues on personal finance search right now, so I revisted Mint recently, just to make sure and posted about it on the blog.

Quick summary: Mint is still tempting, and still a waste of time. Too bad. Quicken desktop with autoupdate web interface is still my best option — though not as pretty.