Getting Started – Review of the Mint.com Signup Process
Published on - November 18th, 2010 (by J.D. Roth) On Tuesday, I wrote that I’ve decided to track my finances again. I’m doing fine financially, but after a few months of not watching my income and expenses closely, I feel a little lost. I miss the ability to know exactly where my money’s going.
I had intended to install the new desktop version of Quicken, which is what I’ve been using for years. (Before that, I used Andrew Tobias’s Managing Your Money, but that hasn’t been updated since 1995!) In the comments to Tuesday’s post, several readers asked why I don’t just use Mint. Good question. I don’t really have a good answer.
Mint is a free web-based personal-finance program. Mint automagically connects with your bank accounts, your credit card accounts, and — in theory, at least — your investment accounts. Because Mint fetches data for you, there’s no tedious data entry. Mint has been around for a couple of years, but I’ve been reluctant to try it.
I haven’t tried Mint for several reasons:
- It didn’t offer all the features I wanted, particularly the ability to track investment accounts.
- I didn’t like the revenue model. Mint makes money by pushing new financial products on users. I’ve since realized that — duh! — that’s the same way Get Rich Slowly makes money, as well as the rest of the financial web.
- I was loyal to the folks at Wesabe, a Mint competitor and friend to GRS. Unfortunately, Wesabe shut down earlier this year. (You can read about it here.)
- Though I fully embrace the Internet Age, I’m still wary of giving one service access to all of my accounts.
But enough GRS readers have sung the praises of Mint over the past two years that I finally decided to give it a try. Yesterday, I set up my Mint account.
Getting Started
If you’ve signed up for any other web-based service, you know what it’s like to register for Mint. After you enter your e-mail address, your zip code, and your password, you’re ready to go.
Once you’ve registered, Mint prompts you to enter your financial accounts. You need just two pieces of information to connect to any account.
After you supply your login info for each bank or credit card company, Mint connects to the financial institution and slurps up your recent transactions. (I was pleased when my local credit union connected without incident.)
As you set up your Mint account, you can also add loans, real estate (such as your home), vehicles, and “other” accounts. Other accounts include:
- Cash (or debt)
- Collectibles (such as my comic-book collection)
- Jewelry
- Furniture and appliances
- And a variety of miscellaneous items
You can also set up e-mail and text alerts based on a variety of parameters. This feature seems very handy, especially in this age of identity theft. I keep tabs on my accounts regularly to be sure there’s no monkey business going on; Mint lets me automate that process.
Mint also allows you the option to enter demographic information (which I did),; I’m sure this leads to better-targeted advertising!
You don’t have to set everything up at the start. You can edit your accounts whenever you want by clicking “Your Accounts” at the top of any page. Good thing, too, because as I’ll share in a moment, the set-up process wasn’t without glitches.
Using Mint
You make your way around Mint through a handful of tabs at the top of each page. These include the following.
Overview
The Overview section gives you a Big Picture view of your finances, including account balances and alerts. It’s meant to be your home base in Mint.
Transactions
In the Transactions tab, you have access to a day-by-day list of your income and expenses. It’s here that you can view and edit each of your purchases (and deposits). Mint automatically assigns a category to each transaction. It does a fairly good job of guessing, but it’s not perfect. Fortunately, it seems easy to make changes.
For example, here I’m telling Mint that the bill from Qwest isn’t for a home phone (because we don’t have one), but for our internet service.
I like that this section lets you view transactions from all accounts at once or narrow things to a single account. Handy.
Budgets
The Budgets section lets you, well, erect a budget to keep your spending focused. I haven’t had time to play around here, so I can’t comment on its utility. I’m hoping that Mint will allow me to put my beloved Balanced Money Formula (or some other broad budget framework) into use.
Goals
The Goals tab lets you set savings goals, and then walks you through the process of creating a realistic budget for each goal. For example, Kris and I want to go to South America in 2012 (or 2013). Here’s the start of the goal-setting process:
You can even create custom goals if the pre-packaged goals (get out of debt, buy a car, and so on) don’t meet your needs. The goals section is one of my favorite features of Mint.
Trends
With the Trends tab, Mint shows you standard charts and graphs. I’m sure these will be useful in time — in fact, they’re the main reason I want to track my spending! — but at the beginning, there’s not much to see.
For one thing, there’s only about a month of data. For another, a lot of that data is mis-categorized. For example, Mint thinks my payments to State Farm fall in the Financial category. To me, they need to be in a separate Insurance category.
The Trends area will become more useful as Mint accumulates more of my financial data, and as I make sure it’s categorized so that it means something to me.
Investments and Ways to Save
The final two tabs are Investments and Ways to Save. Both of these deserve a closer look.
A bad investment?
Not everything is kittens and roses with Mint. In fact, from what I can tell, the Investment feature doesn’t work at all.
I had real trouble connecting Mint to my Fidelity account. I used the correct login and password, but the connection wouldn’t go through. Mint offered only a cryptic “Your bank needs you!” message without explaining what the problem was.
Clicking the supplied link just took me to the default Fidelity page, where there was no indication that Fidelity was aware there was a problem.
Puzzled, I decided took a look at the Mint discussion forums. Sure enough, other folks were experiencing similar problems. In fact, there seem to be ongoing issues connecting Mint to Fidelity, and have been for months. It’s not an encouraging sign that there are no solutions to be had.
I tried to brainstorm some quick fixes, but no dice. Strangely, however, when I went to the Account Settings page, the Fidelity accounts were listed. When I closed the settings page and visited the Investments page, they didn’t appear. Huh?
The “add investment account” tool indicated that Mint had now connected to Fidelity — but it showed two of every account: the actual account and a phantom account with a balance of zero dollars. Huh?
When I tried to bring these investment accounts into Mint, I was asked to make additional corrections. After doing so, Mint listed both the real and ghost accounts with zero balances. Huh?
None of this made sense, and there was no help to be found.
After nearly an hour of slogging through various iterations of this madness, I gave up. It seems strange that Mint offers an investment “feature” when it’s not ready for prime time. (Or even, apparently, for the late late show.)
Whenever I see a free online service, the first thing I want to know is how the company makes money. Mint makes money through its recommendation engine. Mint looks at your financial habits and existing accounts, and then offers Ways to Save. If you click on this tab, you receive offers in a variety of categories from partner companies. If you sign up, Mint is paid a commission.
This is basically the same revenue model used by personal finance blogs like Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar, as well as big-name sites like Bankrate and Card Ratings. Mint takes it to a new level by comparing your existing accounts and habits to other accounts in its database. For example, here Mint shows that I could save $336 over three years if I moved checking account from my credit union to FNBO Direct.
These recommendations are probably very useful to many Mint users, and they’re much less annoying than I feared they would be.
The bottom line
After using Mint for only a few hours, I like what I’ve seen. Mostly.
The interface is slick, and I can tell the automation is going to be nice. This will indeed let me to track my spending, and may even help prompt me to save for future goals. My big beef is that my investment accounts won’t integrate. This isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker (I don’t make a lot of stock trades), but it’s annoying. I’m used to tracking all of my financial data from within Quicken, and I’d like to do that here. Right now, I can’t.
I’ll use Mint for a few months to see how things go. If I can remember, I’ll post an update on Mint during the first part of April, after I’ve used it full-time for three months. (I don’t plan to make Mint a habit until January 1st.)
Meanwhile, perhaps it’s time for me to dig through the GRS archives. I’ve written before about lesser-known personal-finance programs; maybe I should give one of them a spin in the meantime.
If you’ve used Mint for months or years, I’d love to hear your impressions. Have you managed to get the investment tab to work? (With Fidelity?) Are you pleased with the service? How would you improve it? What should a new user like me know before I get too far?
GRS is committed to helping our readers save and achieve your financial goals.Savings interest rates may be low, but that’s all the more reason to shop for the best rate.Find the highest savings interest rate from Ally Bank, Capital One 360, Everbank, and more.
This article is about Tools
Disclaimer: This content is not provided or commissioned by American Express. Opinions expressed here are author's alone, not those of American Express, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by American Express. This site may be compensated through American Express Affiliate Program.
Discover is a paid advertiser of this site. Reasonable efforts are made to maintain accurate information. See the Discover online credit card application for full terms and conditions on offers and rewards.
SEARCH FOR RECENT ARTICLES
I’ve been using Mint for a little over a year now, and for the most part, I’ve been satisfied with it and the continual changes/updates that have been implemented. I am pleased with the new goals section, and I was VERY happy when they finally allowed you to input pending transactions (that was my major gripe with the program when I first started using it). However, occasionally an item I input as pending gets deleted so I keep a separate document to track expenses that haven’t cleared yet, and I find that the investments and trends sections usually make it difficult for me to find specific information, but I’m sure they’ll fine tune all of that eventually. I’ve never had any issues connecting to my Charles Schwab accounts, and while I seem to have to constantly re-setup my husband’s Ameritrade account, I think that is a problem with Ameritrade and not Mint.
loading....
Mint works fine with my Fidelity accounts and my 401k at Diversified, but its investment features are pretty minimal so it’s not of much use for anything but being able to keep tabs on the balances.
loading....
I have tried three times to sign up with MINT, but my local(small town) does not support it. I have contacted mint to see what to do, and was told to contact the bank. Contacted the bank. Never received a reply. Bank does not even have a website. Any suggestions?
loading....
I tried Mint, but backed out when I read their user agreement. No security system is perfect, much less Mint’s. However, if a breach occurred with my credit union or Visa card, each would replace any money stolen from my accounts. This is NOT so with Mint. Mint holds no responsibility for any security breach to members. If someone is able to steal your banking information from Mint, you’ll be the one left holding the bag.
While the features are very cool, for me it is not worth the risk.
loading....
Like many commenters, I have used Mint for over 2 years and love it.
It easily links to my investment accounts at UBS, Fidelity, Zecco, and Vanguard.
The only issue I have with the investments tab is that the initial investment amount is based on the value of the account when you added it to Mint. My UBS account is much older with a very nice gain on it, but Mint thinks those investments have a loss b/c I setup Mint before the recent market crash. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it is irksome.
Also, with the Goals, there is an option for getting out debt… but it won’t let you link to the mortgage. I don’t carry CC debt, and I do pay a little extra down on the mortgage every month. I’d like to see that reflected in my goals, but alas no.
Otherwise, I love it! Great to see all the account values easily, easy to track spending (we spent how much on Restaurants?!?!?!), and easy to see net worth grow. Viva, Mint!
loading....
i prefer yodlee. it doesn’t look as pretty as mint, but if you customize your dashboard view, i feel it works so much better. also yodlee doesn’t advertise to make money.
loading....
My primary financial tool is YNAB. Honestly, I can’t imagine how I ever used anything else. That said, I have been using Mint for over a year mostly because it allows me to check my account balances from my phone and from other computers (and YNAB does not, at least not yet). I mostly like Mint as it does a pretty good job for my simple purposes. It often requires me to reauthenticate with my accounts but that isn’t too big a deal and certainly not something under their control.
What I don’t like about Mint is its budgeting feature. It simply doesn’t provide the level of control and detail that I’ve become accustomed to with YNAB. Also, using a desktop app like YNAB or Quicken, you can enter transactions manually that won’t appear on Mint until a day or two later so if for whatever reason you need to be tracking your accounts closely, you’ll want to use something that allows you to enter transactions yourself.
loading....
A couple of posters have mentioned that Yodlee writes the backend software that powers Mint. I believe that’s true. So why not just go straight to the source and use Yodlee Money Center? I’ve been using them for over a year, and when I picked them, I had already tried Mint and a couple of other sites. The reason I chose Yodlee is that it allows me to run more complicated reports and I had less connectivity issues than I did with Mint. Yodlee also doesn’t push any financial products on me. I don’t think Yodlee is trying to make money off their Money Center, I believe they use it as a development tool to sell their services to banks and other sites such as Mint.
While Yodlee is not as “pretty” as Mint, I believe anyone who is setting up an online financial management account owes it to themselves to try a Yodlee Money Center account. JD, I’d love to see a review of Yodlee.
loading....
I also use Mint but would love to read some reviews about pageonce. Thanks!
loading....
My biggest gripe about Mint: They do not use check numbers.
I cannot fathom why they leave out check numbers. When trying to be sure I’ve covered all my expenses, check numbers are incredibly important.
This baffles me.
loading....
I used to use Mint and I used to love it, BUT it wasn’t working so well for me– too many holes when it came to cash– which is where I get a big portion of income. I hate splitting transactions which was how I had to track my cash. I made my own thing in Excel and every month, I make it better and better. Now, there’s just nothing that can compete with my Excel workbook- NOTHING. I think Mint is nice for someone who’s ONLY using plastic and who’s income is solely check/direct deposit. Otherwise, it fails. I always loved their charts of how I was spending money but Excel lets me do that too. Also, personally I found their budget system useless. I’ve improved my Excel to also include budget information right alongside spending information. I just don’t think anything can beat something you develop personally.
loading....
Thanks for the reminders about Yodlee. I’ll have to give that a look, too.
loading....
I’ve been using Mint for a few months and I really like it. One thing that annoys me is the fact that they don’t keep my account balances up to the minute. It SAYS it updated 1 minute ago, but if I log-on to the actual website that has my financial information, the numbers don’t add up. I don’t know if this is just an issue I’m going through or everybody.
Another thing that sucks is sometimes the mis-categorize some of my things. My last name is “Ford” so when I make transfers from one of my accounts to another, and it says Briana Ford, they think I’m making automobile payments, and ask me why I’m spending so much on a car. Gets a bit annoying, but that should change once my last name changes.
loading....
Rule number one for account security (any kind of account, not just financial ones) is to never *ever* give away your password. Period, full stop, no exceptions. That Mint requires you to do so means I’ll never use it, and honestly, if you’re at all concerned about security (and you should be), you shouldn’t either. It’s standard practice in EULAs that if you give away your password, the company is absolved of any liability if your account gets compromised. I highly doubt that any company would except Mint of this. That they use Yodlee, thereby transferring your passwords to yet *another* party, only makes it worse, whatever Yodlee can claim about their own security practices and that banks use them for their own sites.
Personally I really wish Wesabe was still around, because they allowed you to upload OFX files yourself if you wanted, without giving them your passwords. I started using it only a couple months before it shut down, and the open-source version released afterward leaves a lot to be desired, honestly, and as far as I can tell it’s not being actively maintained and updated.
loading....
I’ve been using Mint for only a month–I went & tried it after your last “wesabe” post. Yeah, they do have an awesome interface!
My fidelity investment accounts show up fine in Mint EXCEPT for a couple days after some action on the account (like a 401K investment) or near the monthly closing date.
The investments tab in Mint is unfortunately mostly not much use. The totals are correct which is nice–you can get an updated price on your investments without logging into each individual website. However the graphs are often incorrect. If you look elsewhere online, everyone is complaining about this–I don’t know why they don’t fix it. Also the graphs available in investments are pretty useless–for example you can’t compare the performances of the different funds that you own so you can’t easily determine which one you might want to sell. You can only compare each fund one at a time to the Dow or other standard index. So, lame. I also think the other auto-graphs, like in the trends tab, are limiting because they are not always what you really want to look at. In general I wish they’d permit people to customize the information plotted on the graphs.
loading....
I’ve been using Mint.com for a year and a half now, and in that time have seen the website mature and improve into a fairly robust system.
I complete most all of my spending via credit card, so this is ideal for me to be able to correlate that to my budget. Mint.com also supplies a wonderful small iPhone/Android app that gives you a snapshot of your spending and allows you to update your labels on the fly.
I’ve encountered many issues (once every couple of weeks) with refreshing certain accounts over the years, but most all of them are resolved within hours or days, and are not deal breakers for me (just mild annoyances).
Editing transactions and clicking the “mark others like this…” option simplifies the labeling process for similar purchases/bills. Being able to split up a transaction into multiple labels is great for trips to Target (which includes “Consumable” and “Discretionary” for me many times) and ATM Withdrawls, making them far more accurate instead of a $60 black hole.
Oh, I love the notes area as well for reflecting back on purchase (“how did i spend $#.## at Amazon this month… oh, yeah , that board game..”)
Overall, I highly recommend Mint.com for tracking each month and reflecting back on trends over time.
loading....
coincidentally, cnn money had an article a couple of days ago about yodlee, and how mint used their services:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/16/pf/online_banking_yodlee/index.htm
loading....
As an accountant, the lack of a reconciliation feature disturbs me. Depending on a “statement balance” or what shows up in Mint as the current balance is not always accurate.
Also the lack of support people mention doesn’t surprise me considering Intuit is now in charge. I used to do a fair amount of Quickbooks support and this was always a complaint of my clients.
The big issue for me though is security. I have no problem logging in to each bank or financial website individually, but giving a third party all my info with seemingly no recourse if it is stolen is a deal killer.
I’d like to know what other reporting features Mint has, since that is the real value in PF software, in my opinion.
loading....
Let me get a bit technical here, but this is how passwords for databases like this should be stored:
In a a properly engineered database, your password is *never* stored in a usable format. Instead, an encrypted version of your password is stored in the database, and when you log in, the password you supply is encrypted and then compared against the stored one.
Say your password for a website is ‘password’ (that’s a poor choice of password, but no matter). A common encryption will come up with ‘paDR5AW8iLGbA’ and store *that* in the database. Then, every time you log in to this website, you type your username, and ‘password’ and the site looks up your username, and sees that the password associated with it is ‘paDR5AW8iLGbA’. It then encrypts the password you supplied, and if the encrypted version comes out to ‘paDR5AW8iLGbA’, then you’re logged in. Otherwise, you get an error saying you supplied an incorrect password.
What’s important here is that the type of encryption used is *one-way*, meaning that ‘password’ always encrypts to ‘paDR5AW8iLGbA’, but you can never go backwards from ‘paDR5AW8iLGbA’ and find that the original was ‘password’.
This is important because it means that if a careless engineer has a copy of the user database for this website, and his laptop gets stolen, the thief can’t use the passwords from the database to log into the website, because he only has the encrypted versions.
Mint probably does this with the passwords used to log in to their own site.
*BUT* they can’t do this with the passwords for all your other financial sites. Each of these other sites should do the same thing, but Mint still has to supply them with an un-encrypted password, because each bank will do their own encryption.
So Mint has to store un-encrypted passwords for all the accounts that you enter, except of course your Mint password itself. If this database gets lost, the thief has access to all these financial accounts for all of Mint’s customers.
That’s why it’s scary.
There’s also the issue of your Mint account being hacked, such as by someone guessing your Mint password. If Mint is unable to make any changes to your accounts (which is to say you can see them, but not move funds or anything), then this isn’t nearly as bad. The hacker knows your current financial situation, but can’t get any of your money. I’m not sure if this is the case with Mint, does Mint have the ability to alter your connected accounts in any way? If not, then that makes this second attack not so scary.
I’m sure Mint has a *lot* of security around their database of user financial account passwords because of how valuable it is, but there’s still some possibility that it gets lost (you hear stories about this happening to governments once in a while — hundreds of thousands of people’s social security numbers stored on a laptop forgotten in a cab or something).
I still might consider trying it if it has no ability to alter accounts, which protects me in the case that just my account is hacked, which is the much more likely thing to happen.
loading....
There is no way I would have an account with Mint. I used to have an account but based on my and others’ experience with them I don’t trust them now.
loading....
Very interesting post and I love the info on what Mint does. I have been wanting to set up a something to track my spending, savings and goals, and after reading your post and reader comments, Mint is indeed enticing.
However, as some others have mentioned, I am too wary of having all my PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in one place. I just took a required course on this at work and am more than ever conscious of what could happen if someone gets that information.
The thoughts of having all my financial details in one place on the net freaks me out so instead, I will work on setting up a spreadsheet with info similar to Mint. I’ll need to faithfully input the data manually, but I’ll be the one who controls who has access. To make sure I don’t loose momentum, I’ll keep it simple initially and as I go along learn to include more fancy features such as graphs.
I closed my Facebook account over a year ago after reading an article about a country, whose intentions I don’t entirely trust, investing lots of $$$ in Facebook. I know this sounds silly to many, but for me it’s more about having too much info in one place.
JD, really enjoyed your thorough reporting and the obvious time and thought that went into it. It gives me lots of great ideas for that spreadsheet. Please continue to report more about your experience with Mint, and don’t feel badly that this is one thing where I’ll remain a spectator rather than a participant – at least for now!
loading....
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiments expressed by Troy (Poster #84). I am striving for a simplistic fiscal life. I want as few people to pay as possible. I want as few accounts to follow as possible. I do not need to obsessively calculate my net worth or see incremental changes in our portfolio every two days. For me, that represents yet another time suck. I also think online tools, such as Mint, can induce or perpetuate “paralysis analysis”. Apart from that, I am certainly not comfortable with Mint as an information aggregator despite the assurances from several posters, for security reasons, especially in light of them expressly limiting their damages.
The cool, slick, and dynamic interface that Mint has still does not assuage my concerns.
loading....
Anybody have any information on whether or not Mint will work in Canada?
Or, does anybody know of a Canadian equivalent?
Please email me!
bbeharrell@gmail.com
Thanks in advance!
loading....
I like mint overall but it can’t connect to my zecco investment account or to my credit union, and sometimes has created duplicate accounts. I use a spreadsheet with my additional data and plug the mint net worth number in… imperfect but still a useful tool. Lots of features I don’t use.
loading....
Great write up on Mint, J.D.
I tried Mint last year. We were in the “gazelle” mode and Mint didn’t work with the way my mind thinks. For example, I do all of my bill paying online and in advance, I’m still wanting to add an entry in my ledger to show that I actually paid it but also to get a big picture look at how much is left over to apply to debt and other financial goals.
At the time, Mint was only pulling actual checking account information which wasn’t helping me project the “leftover” cash. I’ve heard this might be different now so I need to look at it again. The post at least got me thinking in that direction again too. We’re getting back to tracking accounts and categories again too.
loading....
I was going to suggest you dump Quicken on your last post but didn’t want to go off track!
I want to throw in a vote for YNAB. I love the way it puts your budget right out front. I switched from Quicken to YNAB (after using Quicken for more than twenty years!) and realized that even though I was tracking my spending in Quicken, the tracking wasn’t leading anywhere good. I was tracking that I was spending too much money!
When I switched to YNAB I realized that I could completely restructure my finances and wipe out my credit card debt. When things start to go wrong, when I’m spending too much, it shows up right away.
I have the same issue with YNAB that you mentioned with Mint, that it doesn’t allow me to track my investments. But on the other hand, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. YNAB keeps me coming back every week looking at where I am relative to my budget, whereas really I only need to manage investments every couple of months.
loading....
I loved MINT. Note past tense. MINT *was* an awesome financial tool when I was single. However, MINT lost its edge when it came to adding joint accounts. Here are a few reasons why I stopped using MINT.
1.) There is no way to really add an additional user to your account. Not a huge deal, but would have been nice to give hubby his own login.
2.) Speaking of hubby…MINT doesn’t handle joint accounts very gracefully. For instance, me and my husband both happened to use the same bank prior to getting married. However, when I added his login to my MINT account, it added his personal checking AND RE-ADDED our joint account (since it was already associated with my bank login).
3.) Unrelated to joint accounts, if you bank with a local credit union, you probably won’t be able to add those accounts to MINT.
While those three reasons are deal-breakers for us, MINT is a pretty sweet tool. And frankly, any tool that helps give you insight on how you are spending/saving is a good one. Right now, ours is Google Docs.
loading....
I have a love/hate relationship with Mint.
Mint how I love your beautiful user interface. When you work, you are so simple and “just work”. When you don’t I want to reach through my screen and muddle you for tea.
I have been back a month for a second try at Mint. We have used Quicken and Yodlee in the past. I also just downloaded MoneyDance to give it a whirl.
Mint Pros:
Clean, Simple inuitive user interface
Budget feature is great to get a snapshot of where your spending your hard earned dollars.
Trend feature is useful for long term planning
Mint Cons:
Too simple for some
Buggy
Bad support
I am having a hard time putting this into words but…
When used for its strengths, Mint is hard to beat. I feel it is best used for a quicksnapshot of how you spend and budget your money with the least amount of time invested.
I have thought of having Quicken just to keep “hard data” aggregated in one place.
Remember Mint.com is Free. You usually get what you pay for in the long run. You only have to look at what Intuit did to QuickenOnline users.
J
loading....
Mint looks great and I enjoyed reading your review. The only thing that keeps me from using it is potential security issues. If there was a data breach that could be disastrous. If I could ever get a decent and satisfactory explanation, then I might use it.
loading....
I have different passwords for all of my various accounts for a reason. Namely, if someone got the password for one of my accounts, they would not have the passwords to my other accounts.
I would not want any one place to have access to all of my passwords, let alone my usernames and my passwords.
loading....
Hey J.D,
Nice tutorial. Unfortunately I live in Australia and can’t really utilise the power of mint. My alternative is Money Strands (https://money.strands.com/) as you can download your bank transactions data and upload to your Money Strands account. It’s good for those people that are suspicious about letting someone else access their bank account too.
Cheers,
loading....
Been using Mint for about 5 months, and not a fan. Only half my Vanguard accounts will sync, and Mint’s support has consisted of repeating the FAQ. A minor annoyance.
More annoying is that Mint miscategorizes about 1/3 of my transactions. Not unexpected the first month, but Mint doesn’t learn from my corrections.
What pushed me firmly into the “not a fan” category was when it said that a purchase at a fabric store in Napa, California was from Napa Auto Parts. Since I hadn’t been to a Napa Auto Parts store in years, I was seconds away from canceling all my credit cards (being sure my card had been stolen). Luckily I decided to check my bank’s website first — the store was correctly identified there. I contacted Mint twice about this, with no answer at all.
loading....
my biggest complaint with mint is on my intial load (which was 2 years ago) it was able to go back and pull 6 months of wells fargo data but only 2 months of credit card data. This made it look like I only had 1/3 of my credit card bill per month. I wish they had a place to say. Start tracking data from x date on. This would easily fix the problem and should be pretty easy to implement.
loading....
I like Mint, but I haven’t found it as useful as I would like because it takes too long to update. The notices always happen a day or 2 behind and make me either laugh or make me annoyed since they are either wrong (balance is low, etc.) or I already know the information.
loading....
I have been a Mint user for over 2 years now. Probably since almost the beginning. The Investments feature as well as Trends is relatively new.
Mint has been flawless with almost all of my accounts…Fidelity 401k to Roth IRA at Vanguard, even my DSPP from BNY. In fact the only account that seems to be of issue is my brokerage with TradeKing.
With my account at Zecco however, it has the stock purchase price and therefore my Unrealized Gains and Losses incorrect, but shows me my correct balances on all accounts.
I love the budget feature of mint, and getting warnings when I am close to my limit for eating out etc…
I have been pretty bad about inputing my cash transactions, which Mint labels as ATM withdrawal, so there is a little money that is not reported accurately, but I don’t really see that as something they can fix (it’s on me).
Overall I love using Mint. Someone also told me I could manually create an account and enter in the balance for my TradeKing account, but it would not contain the transactional data. Just that if I wanted my overall financial situation to be accurate, that I could add it myself.
loading....
I’m an American living in Australia – with accounts in both countries. When I researched personal finance / account aggregators / tools like this a couple year ago, Mint was out of the question because it couldn’t track my Aus accounts. I went with Yodlee MoneyCenter. It tracks all my accounts – I have 3 Aus accounts and all my US-based stuff (including Fidelity and a credit union … and a few others) – they all get sucked up togehter and it displayed in US dollars when I am looking al everything together but in the currency of the account when I am just looking at the one account. It is really, really clever. So, anyone who has accounts outside of the US should take a look at Yodlee.
loading....
Thanks so much for that thorough description of what Mint.com does and does not do. I’ve always been curious about this as a Quicken user since 2005. I’m 100% devoted to Quicken so unless I’m going to still have all the same features I’m used to, I probably won’t ever switch to Mint.com. I’m just annoyed I didn’t implement the idea of Mint.com before it existed and it be me that’s rich instead!
loading....
I was going to suggest Mint to you too, I’m glad the other readers stepped up!
I follow a more loose budget approach and only categorize my transactions once a month. We are already spending less than we earn (which was a surprise to us when we started using Mint), so the end of the month just shows us how much we have left over to pay towards the credit card. It gives us an incentive to be “good” throughout the month. And, it means we’re only spending 30 minutes on the budget every month.
I do like their progress bars that show where you are with your budgets mid-month, though we don’t really use them.
My accounts used to update slowly or encounter errors, but that seems to have corrected. Every once in a while there is a Firefox issue that makes it unuseable, but switching to a different browser solves that.
loading....
Wow! So many comments, I don’t know if I should bother but … I’ve been using Mint for about two months. So far so good. No problems connecting to Sharebuilder and other online investment account, though I have considered deleting some or all of them because I don’t know how important it is to see these all in one place. I do worry about security despite what Mint has to say, and I figure as long as I’m telling Mint where my current income is going (via budget category), why do I need to see it on the other end?
To the Rachel who was having paycheck entering issues–do you direct deposit? and If so, don’t all the transactions come up automatically without entering the info yourself?
loading....
I’ve heard lots of great things about Mint, and I’m sure its a great site.
But, as I have said before, I would rather focus on eliminating my unnecessary spending rather than tracking the spending that I do.
If you do this, there’s isn’t that much spending left to track.
loading....
I’ve used Mint for about a year now. Despite intermittent connection troubles with various accounts (PNC and ING, but never my Fidelity account), I’ve particularly enjoyed the weekly “summary” email. I do not use it for precise budgeting–instead I use it to keep track of the bigger pictures: income, total spending, and savings. I suppose I’m a bit too lazy to make sure each transaction is properly categorized.
loading....
I just left Mint after about 20 months of use. Their parsing of my HSBC transactions is horrible and I’m often left with no clue what the origins of many transactions are. Many times the full text string is visible but the transaction detail is wrong. It became too time consuming and annoying to constantly fix the same parsing errors over and over each week.
loading....
@David #140
The budget and trend features are some the best things about Mint.com They help you find your unnecessary spending in a clear and easy way.
loading....
I’ve been using Mint for about a year, and like it. And hey, it’s free!
It’s easy, I can access it anywhere. I like the goal feature and seeing the pie chart snapshot of my spending for the month.
Also, I don’t think the ‘Connect with your Facebook account’ button should be so close to the ‘submit comment’ button. Easy to misclick on the wrong one.
loading....
After graduating from college I started using Mint.com to see my overall spending better than an excel spreadsheet. I love Mint because I can track my student loans as well as my banking info. Along with spending, I can track the amount of money I put away to reduce my overall debt.
I agree that having allowing access to personal financial info is risky (Paypal comes to mind), but I have yet to hear of any major complaints.
loading....
I am amazed at how many people are willing to put all of their financial information at risk by giving it to a corporation who only profits when they give your information away.
loading....
USAA has recently upgraded their site. It now provides a money tracking service. If someone breaks the code- THEY are in big trouble.
loading....
Mint is great! I’ve been using it for around two years. I’ve had problems with ING too, but the past few months updates have been super quick.
As someone who’s never closely tracked their finances before, it’s been a lifesaver. I think anyone who is a visual learner will especially find it appealing; it’s better designed websites out there.
loading....
I’m a HUGE proponent of Mint. I’ve gotten at least 10 of my friends hooked on it over the last 4 years.
For those with account issues, I believe it’s often a combination of the security and Mint-friendliness of the site that keeps it from being synced properly. Luckily, I haven’t had any issues with the banks I used. In the beginning my small local bank wasn’t available, but over time it was added. Absolutely love how simple the interface is. Over time I’ve tried multiple different programs (Quicken, YNAB, etc.) but I keep using Mint as it does nearly everything I need. I do wish, however, that the goals could be linked to a specific loan account.
loading....
I have been using Mint for over 2 years now. I had a small problem with my Credit Union at one point. My CU updated some of their website addresses. I posted in the Mint forums about my problem. There was 1 other post on the subject. It took about 2 weeks for a solution. Not bad for a problem that was only affecting possibly just 2 users.
The only thing i’ve seen is i have a bank account i closed. To keep my transaction data i have to leave the account in Mint. I marked it as closed but it still gives me an error every so often that it can not update the account. Not sure why it tries to update closed accounts.
All in all i love Mint.
loading....