Of late, though, I am very disappointed that Mint has no means of importing data (CSV or Quicken Data file). This would be most handy from a historical point of view, as well as a work around for the financial data that can’t be accessed through Mint’s existing sync means.

Many loyal Mint users are clamoring for this import feature and have been for the last year. To date, there hasn’t been any indication from Mint that this feature will emerge.

I am interested to explore Yodlee next.

A lot of people have had the reaction of “Well, it’s free, so you shouldn’t complain…” but given the fact that Mint IS making money off the service and aggregating all of my financial data, I would expect a little better.

So I would love to use Mint and found it useful when it worked… but it just was never working for me. I tried Thrive instead and while it’s good, I found Mint better… well, provided it was working.

I had problems with Mint that I could not resolve: double postings. Also on one account, when I changed my P/W, I also changed my P/W for that account on Mint but I could not get them to synch.

I really like Ramit’s point of view on this one: budgeting kinda sucks. If you set yourself up for long term goals with automated debt repayment and savings plans, then just do whatever you want with the rest of your money. If you discover you’re spending $100 or $200 a month on Latte’s, then so what? Chances are you know you’re doing so without Mint telling you, and it doesn’t matter unless there is something higher priority that you would be spending your money on.

For me I have I several ING Savings accounts that receive automated payments off the top of my paycheck every cycle, so I know that I’m saving up for the things that I care about. After that, whatever is in my checking account is good times money.

There are some glitches from time to time with certain accounts and one of my loan accounts is not updating correctly even after repeated complaints and some of my credit cards (store brands) I can’t even get in the system – so it is not perfect, definitely. But it’s by far the best out there and it has huge value for me in helping me keep track of my finances.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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,

I would not want any one place to have access to all of my passwords, let alone my usernames and my passwords.