This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman.
I haven't tracked our expenses since June.
Not to appear completely incompetent, I do check our accounts on a regular basis to verify the charges and withdrawals. But I can't tell you how much we spent on groceries in August or how much we spent on fuel in October without printing out some statements and manually doing the math.
For a long time, I dutifully downloaded our statements at the end of each month and uploaded them into Quicken on my desktop (I have an old version of Quicken). I'd go through each expense, verifying its category. The process took an hour or so, mainly because I'd have to go online to look up check payees, but I did it without fail.
Then I fell behind a month. And one month turned into two. The more I fell behind, the more I dreaded updating our accounts since I knew my procrastination meant the process would take much longer. How could I remember in October why we withdrew $40 from an ATM in August?
This month, my husband enrolled at a trade school. His schedule will change after starting school, and that will translate to a change in his salary. We're trying to figure out our best option. The first thing we needed to look at was our budget. But without some recent figures, we had no idea what we've been spending in each category.
Budgeting FAIL.
After getting those numbers the really-hard-and-no-fun way (manually), I started to think about joining Mint.
Why I didn't join before
I held out for two reasons. One was security concerns. But in the comments of Get Rich Slowly's early review of Mint, Founder and CEO Aaron Patzer wrote: “You're safer on Mint than with online banking. Mint has a read-only connection to your bank; there's no money transfer in Mint.”
He also pointed out the physical security, proactive account activity alerts, and that Mint uses Yodlee on the back-end. (Yodlee has been in operation for 10 years without a major security breach.)
I was still nervous about typing in my passwords, but after reading through the security precautions on the Mint website, I decided to try it. Obviously the old method of downloading statements was not working for me, and it would be silly to pretend that was going to change.
The other reason I resisted joining Mint is that I had tried Yodlee for a few months, and the system had so many bugs it was unusable:
- For example, I had a category set up called “personal.†I used the category for items like toothpaste, toilet paper, etc. Shortly after setting up my accounts and categorizing months of transactions, Yodlee reported that I had spent $425 in the personal category. Normally, it's under $25. When I clicked on the category to view the transactions, the system would time out. I logged into my bank accounts to verify that the $425 was incorrect (it was). No matter what I tried, the $425 wouldn't go away, and the system would not list the individual transactions.
- Second, Yodlee had it in for my ING Direct accounts. It quit pulling account information one day, showing an error. I tried many times to get Yodlee to connect with ING Direct, even deleting the account and adding it back, but it was a no-go. I contacted customer service about these issues, but didn't receive any actual help fixing the problems.
With Yodlee misreporting my transactions and rejecting my ING Direct accounts, it was no longer a feasible option for tracking my expenses.
Why I'm giving Mint a chance
Despite my experience with Yodlee, I'm willing to give Mint a chance (and my fingers are crossed that the bugs have been fixed) because some of Mint's features might help me avoid what kept me from dutifully tracking my expenses, such as:
- It's online. I can log onto Mint during my lunch break and modify transactions, if needed. Before, I'd have to do this at home, usually on the weekend, which meant I'd forget about it or avoid it.
- It's simple. When I open Mint, the accounts are listed down the left-hand side and the budget is on the right. The budget is a bar graph showing how much I've spent in each category for the month and how much was allotted for that category. That's really all I want from my personal finance software. The detailed reports in Quicken were fun, but I didn't use them. All I want to know is how much I've spent in each budget category.
- It has alerts. These were annoying until I took the time to tell Mint which alerts I wanted, but they can be useful. You can set up alerts for the low balances, bill reminders, credit available, unusual spending, over budget, interest rate changes, trade commission charges, bank fees, large deposits, and large purchases.
So far, I like Mint. The budget planning is exactly what I wanted. There are still some issues with my ING Direct accounts, though. When I log in, I get an error and have to enter the answers to two security questions. Inconvenient, yes, but after a few minutes my accounts do actually update, so I can deal with that.
For now, it seems like a good solution.
Do any of you Mint users experience these issues? And what kind of experiences have you had with other online personal finance software?
You’re not the only one with the security concern: that was the single biggest obstacle they had to overcome to get a following.
I joined for a few months but eventually closed my account. It was cool, yes, but it just wasn’t for me. I’m the type of person that checks his account almost every day, so the convenience factor of seeing it all in one page wasn’t that great. Now that my wife and I have rolled up our finances and I don’t have time to be as OCD, I might reconsider.
Hope you’re enjoying it!
I’ve been using kublax.com (for uk users) for about 6 months and it is great. I found it while looking for a mint equivilent over here, and it seems to do the job much as you have described above.
I also had issues with my ING accounts for about a month where they would work only intermittently or not at all. I recently deleted them and added them back in and had no further problems.
My only issues with mint are that they constantly seem a day or two behind my bank as to when transactions have gone through. Other than that I like the big picture charts and graphs. It definitely has helped me in prioritizing where I spend my money and what I needed to cut back on. Like you I hated to have to look up every transaction and usually just wouldn’t do it. So in essence mint is alright not without flaws but ok for me.
The hardest thing for me is to rethink how I categorize my spending. Prior to hearing about Mint, I setup a general budget in Excel. I had categories that, more or less, made sense to me but I couldn’t track spending without manually inputing my transactions into the spreadsheet. So I tried Quicken. That helped but, like you, I had to download my statements from each account and then categorize them and so on. I still had the issues of categorizing my transactions into areas that made sense and I had to download and import them into Quicken.
I like that Mint downloads the transactions automatically. Yes, sometimes I get concerned about the potential security issues, but the benefits outweigh my concerns. Also, ING has been an issue for me but I’ll try what Brian suggested. I like how easily accounts and budgets can be created and erased. That’s a definite plus that I didn’t experience with Quicken.
Now to rethink how to categorize my transactions so that they make sense to me and are easy to use. My old way might sorta work for me but there must be a better way too.
Love Mint! Great concept and execution. Simple (one setup and it’s pretty much done), easy to navigate (user-friendly) and gives you an overall financial snapshot (all in one place).
I believe their CEO has spoken about the continued problems with ING. It’s due to their security protocols. The best times to update your data with ING is before 8AM and after 8PM. I think this is correct and that they are continuing to work with ING to correct this issue. In one since you should feel good if the only reason they can’t connect with ING is because of ING’s increased security protection (that’s always a plus…bonus to ING)
I’m going to start budgeting with Mint once I have a more steady income. Currently we use Excel because I like to setup that kind of stuff and have a few extra calculations I enjoy looking at.
I’m a Mint user for life if they keep this up. Merging into Intuit will grow their user base drastically and give them the support of those who trust Quicken with their finances.
What I like about mint: a one stop, at-a-glance understanding of my finances. Its simple, I log in and look in the corner, and there’s my net worth.
What I don’t like: improper use of basic accounting rules. By this I mean transfers between bank accounts just get added to income and expense totals. So by the time my direct deposit gets moved arouond between savings, investments and bill-pay accounts, Mint reports my monthly income as 1.8x my salary, and my expenses as .8x my salary (before spending a dime!). Another issue I have is that purchase classification still needs some work, further my bank recently switched styling on my the downloadable statements and online registers, so mint un-classified all my previous purchases.
Overall mint is nice for some things, but feels chaotic and messy if you have a personal system or mildly complex finances.
I’ve been using Yodlee for more than a year now after trying out Mint in beta and experiencing quite a bit of frustration. Both Yodlee and Mint have recently made improvements and changes to their user experience and I’d be tempted to try Mint again if there was an easy way to migrate my accounts.
That being said, I’m generally really happy with Yodlee and I’ve even started using their bill pay service without any issues. With Yodlee I feel like the promise of “everything in one place” is really paid off, even if it isn’t as sexy looking at Mint. I’ve yet to find an account I can’t quickly add and I like the dashboard and Net Worth features.
They’ve also improved the look of the budgeting tools with a choice of bar, pie and list views and quick drill-down options by category.
One thing I can’t ever figure out (not in Mint when I tried it, or Yodlee) is how to view my savings in relation to my income and expenses in a way that helps me track how I’m doing towards my 60/10/10/10/10 approach. And that’s the budget focus that is the most meaningful to me at this time. I end up doing that math separately.
But I am a huge fan of online money management tools and they’ve had a huge role in my financial recovery.
Unfortunately, Mint’s alerts are useless unless you log in frequently. Quicken Online’s alerts are usually better because they’re supposed to update you in real time.
I think Mint is a great starting point for anyone who wants to manage their money online. As you point out, it’s a simple and easy to understand interface, and I also love the alert features.
One of the reasons I don’t use Mint regularly is because we use an envelope budget in our family, which is very hard to execute successfully in Mint, so we’ve opted for other online solutions.
Speaking with friends and colleagues however, I have found that those who use it have had great success with it over other, potentially more complicated or buggy pieces of software.
I was under the impression that the problems with ING and mint are because ING is throwing up security flags because a third party keeps crawling the transaction list. Plus, I don’t think they like that their customers are giving out login information either.
Mint is useful, but most times it seems like I am fighting with it to make it do what I want. Lately I’ve become disenchanted with it, and am looking to take up my own manual system.
Followup to the above comments. I completely agree with Erich about the mess up with transfers in Mint. I thought it was something I was doing different than anyone else but mine does the same thing. When I transfer between banks it creates lots of confusion. Secondly, Matt is right. Mint needs to update all accounts at night to send alerts out regardless of your last login.
I use Yodlee and Mint together. The one specific feature I wish Mint would add is an ability that Yodlee has of pulling in other bills. Yodlee pulls in my bill/data from my electrical company and Comcast (cable/internet). Really nice additions as they truly show a bigger financial snapshot.
Love online money managers and big on Web 2.0 stuff so all this is fascinating to me. Of course with any program there is always room for improvement and I know that Aaron Patzer is looking forward to diving into a lot of these updates after they finish the buy out and merging of data with Quicken.
I’m sure these products hold a lot of future potential…
It’s worth noting that Yodlee/Mint still has problems with ING. They are intermittant, sometimes it works for months at a time, but when it stops working its usually for at least a week.
I still haven’t tried Mint either, although I’m curious about it. Do you plan to do a follow up on how you like it after a few months? For now I just use spreadsheets that don’t do anything for me automatically except the math. It’s good for me to input my spending on a more real-time basis, although lately I keep letting stuff pile up for a few days before tackling it.
I love Mint…I’m just frustrated that it’s taking them so long to add my local credit union, but I understand the supply/demand aspect of this issue. The credit union pretty much serves my county, so there’s probably not a whole lot of other people requesting it to pull it up on their to-do list.
Security was a concern for me as well before I signed up but the fact that Intuit (the producers of Quicken/Quickbooks) bought them out shortly after I did sign up gave me extra confidence!
You’re still giving your username and password to Mint. Even though they have a read-only connection, what happens if the mint.com website is hacked and someone steals your username and password? They could sign into your bank’s website and make transactions.
I’m the creator of NeoBudget – http://www.neobudget.com – and I created an import wizard that lets you import your bank statement without needing to enter your username and password. It’s much more secure than any of the automated options out there. NeoBudget has a ton of other excellent budgeting features too.
I tried Mint and like it pretty well. I do need to be more strict about budgeting though. That’s my major money downfall!
I was looking at Mint and trying them out, but the recent acquisition by Intuit made me cancel my account. I feel Inuit to be a monopoly in personal finance software, the lack of competition will stifle innovation. I also dont like how Inuit will give you a fully functional product, then slowly pull out features in updates to make you pay for a more expensive “professional/business/investment” version. But what really burns my butt about Inuit is they will disable downloading transactions if your version of Quicken is sufficiently old as a way to make you upgrade.
I feel the behavior of Inuit with Quicken will eventually poison Mint. Therefore, I decided to quit while I was ahead.
Our long-time use of ING and Quicken has given us no problems. Concerning budgeting, I’ve become convinced that the most important thing each month is our steady auto-deposits into our IRA’s, ING savings accounts and 401(k)’s. The details of our other spending categories are fairly trivial relative to that.
The next most important thing is the fact that we have zero consumer debt — in sharp contrast to my situation in the 90’s. Here are the summary tips of my permanent exit from consumer debt; hope they can help someone: http://www.diamondcutlife.org/top-five-tips-on-breaking-free-of-credit-cards/
The best interest rates are often offered by small banks that, in my experience, Mint/Yodlee can’t get data from. This causes Mint to provide an incomplete picture of my financial situation, which makes it fairly useless for me.
I prefer to use YNAB. I store my YNAB data file in my Dropbox so my wife and I can both share our budget at home and at work. I punch in any receipts I get when I get home (takes about 2 minutes), and reconcile my many accounts about once a month (only takes about 10 minutes because 99% of the time the bank’s balance matches YNAB’s balance).
Mint is entirely useless to me unless there is a way for me to connect it to ALL my banks (very unlikely for local banks) or import transactions for the unsupported banks (this also seems unlikely). Mint is unable to connect to get access to 11/12 of my student loans, and is therefore useless in tracking my largest expense. I’m much better off manually downloading transactions and importing them into GNUCash.
Update: My ING accounts quit updating. Maybe it’s time for the old pencil and notebook method? Sigh.
I’ve been using Mint for about a year. I’m a big fan.
Sounds great, wish I could use Mint. I just spent 20 minutes trying to get Mint to connect with USAA and I give up. Did anyone else have similar problems?
Mint is excellent. Someone noted about the alerts being useless unless you log in frequently. I just have mint send me a weekly email and I log in then. I take a minute or two to review and re-categorize a purchase or two and we’re off.
For beginners or experts alike they offer advice such as check your accounts, start an emergency fund, etc. that keeps people on the right track.
Of course, the implementation is elegant, secure, and darn right awesome.
Nice post, I have also been wanting to join Mint, but didn’t for the same reasons you didn’t.
Nice to see that Mint is safer then my bank and I’m on that all the time.
Mint sounds interesting and easy to use. Though, I would hesitant to use it only because I use QuickBooks and enter my transactions daily. I also check my bank account on a daily basis as well and update everything in QuickBooks. As long as I keep this up and don’t miss any more than 3 days, I don’t spend very much time on this task.
However, if Mint automatically balances a check book register in QuickBooks, I’m there! That would be a plus for me and a huge incentive to use it. I’m behind about 6 months with my bank statements and reconciling my main account. (Again, I check my expenses daily and enter them in QuickBooks, so I only reconcile to make sure I didn’t miss anything!)
I’d love to try Mint (despite my concerns about security), but it doesn’t look like they’ll be adding Canadian banks to their list anytime soon.
If anybody knows of a good, reliable, and useful Canadian alternative, I’d love to hear about it!
@ April:
Mint has issues with ING: http://forums.mint.com/showthread.php?t=1646&page=33
It’s ING’s problem, not Mint’s. ING has some security protocols that they don’t like Mint (or any account aggregator) bypassing. I believe Mint’s CEO is trying to work with ING to allow Mint to work with it completely (and stably).
For what its worth, my ING account fails to update about once every couple of weeks, but it is only out for a day or two.
I wouldn’t write Mint off just because of the ING Problem: where else can you get a complete snapshot of your total financial picture (for free)? Once you use it for a while, its really interesting to see where your money goes… for instance: “I spent HOW MUCH on coffee shops last year!?” That one got me.
Good luck! :)
I’m surprise there is such a demand for Mint. My bank has all of the online tracking tools that Mint does and I love it.
I’ve been using Wesabe, a Mint-like site, for a couple of years now and find it really helpful. It seems to have fewer of the uploading issues than Mint, but does the same job. If Mint isn’t working for you, you should try it.
David #24 I had similar issues with my Chevron/Texaco account. I finally deleted that account from Mint. Chevron/Texaco sent me an email stating that an outside source was trying to log on to my account. I like Mint only somewhat.
I moved my money out of ING Direct precisely because they block Mint. Now I use Ally, get a higher interest rate, and have full visibility into my money.
Oh, and I used the Bank Rates Center on this site to find Ally, so hopefully JD got a referral bonus.
Hate the Mint.
They refuse to fully support all the accounts for my bank despite multiple complaints from other users. Any correspondence with them about it results in a canned response directing you to read the account setup instructions.
+1 for Wesabe.
I used Quicken for years but in the past couple of years I’ve felt bullied by Intuit and frustrated with Quicken for trying to be more complicated than I need.
I didn’t really care for MS Money and Microsoft recently announced that they are discontinuing it anyway.
My accounting needs are pretty simple and so far Mint has been ok. I do have problems with my ING account.
I am concerned about Intuit having bought Mint since I have come to loathe Quicken.
For now Mint is fine for me. If it starts causing me any major headaches it’ll be time for the ‘old fashioned’ spreadsheet approach.
I was cautious like you and read everything up and down about Mint. Seems ok enough, although I’d prefer that Mint would work with the banks for a more secure solution. Perhaps using public key authentication from Mint to bank websites that only grants read-only access for transactions when entering with the key. By using public key auth your password would be kept separate and never have to be stored, so it would be much more secure. To make it even better the keys could be changed every month or so.
I’m glad one of my banks took a step in the right direction by requiring me to periodically enter one of those encrypted images to continue allowing Mint access.
For those who can’t get their bank to work with Mint I’ve found that Quicken Online supports many more banks. Although, Quicken bought Mint so I wonder how that’ll change things.
I have nothing but good things to say about mint for the most part. My biggest issue with them is that they don’t support either of my credit cards, so I have to manually enter my spending on them once the payment is deposited from my savings. But for a free resource, I’d say it works pretty darn well.
Luke, Mint does not store your login information. It is stored with Yodlee and as April mentioned, they’ve been around for 10 years without a security breach.
And no offense, but it’s hard to take your “concerns” seriously when you start pimping your own product in the next paragraph.
Personally, I’ve never understood the security concerns with Mint. Sure, it’s one more website, but you receive sensitive things in the mail all the time.
And what’s so safe about banks themselves? Every few months, you hear about how a laptop was stolen that had 2 million names, addresses, and social security numbers.
I trust Mint way more than the creepy guy at the post office.
Someone actually “hacking” into a bank or Mint is extremely unlikely. You’re much more likely to lose money because of employee stupidity (losing a laptop), phishing scams, or stolen mail.
I really like using Mint.
However, there is a small problem on how it views my credit card payments.
If I make a $200 payment from my checking account to my credit card…somehow Mint ended up balancing the $200 payments and making it zero:
So Mint views my transactions as:
Checking Credit Card Payment Sent: -$200
Credit Card Company Payment Received: +$200
Total Credit Card Payments: $0
My budget then goes off because I budget for credit card payments. I reported this to Mint as a bug, but they haven’t responded.
Does anyone else have this problem?
I really *want* to love Mint, and have tried it several times. But, like others have said, it is useless to me if it can’t grab ALL my accounts, and it seems to have trouble with several of the institutions at which I bank.
Duddes02,
You aren’t supposed to budget for Credit Card Payments. The reason being is that, when you bought the stuff that was on the Credit Card, it has already been entered into Mint and Categorized. When you pay off the Credit Card, you are just accounting for those previous purchases, and ACTUALLY using the money to buy them. You aren’t spending more money.
Don’t budget for Credit Card Payments. Budget for the stuff you use the credit card to buy.
Yet another Canadian wishing there were an equivalent tool available for us up here in the Great White North!
“The more I fell behind, the more I dreaded updating our accounts since I knew my procrastination meant the process would take much longer.”
This. This is me all over, and why I can’t get ahead when it comes to this stuff. Nothing I have ever, ever tried has made it easy enough to set up and do that I’ve ever been able to stick with it. Falling behind makes me fall further behind, because I try to avoid the timesink that is updating. :P
I too don’t like inter-account transfers showing up as income/expense. I do, however, like that I have a simple, single place to view all my accounts (checking, savings, investment, retirement). One shortcoming is that it is always looking backward – no way to play what-if scenarios (e.g. If I buy a car and the payment is X, what does my financial picture look like, how does that affect cash flow?)
I like Mint, but it’s not perfect. Sometimes it’s algorithms will classify random thinks like ATM withdrawls to Health/Beauty or Magazines. I now use iXpenseit on my iPhone and it’s very easy to plug in my expenses on the fly. I really do feel that I now know where my money goes, it gives you good graphing options, etc. I got tired of always fixing my ING account with Mint, life is short!
I tried Mint and wanted to like it, but it wasn’t for me. #20, Jacob Allred mentioned YNAB. I’ve just started using that, and I think it’s terrific budgeting program, and like that it’s about planning *before* the bills are paid and the money is spent. Granted, it isn’t free, but the customer support is _hands-down_ *fantastic*.
We’re stuck with a dial-up connection without any relief in sight, so an off-line program is much easier to maintain.
I’ve been using Mint for about 18 months and I really like it. It’s definitely helped me get a handle on where all my money was going, especially the little nickel and dime stuff that was escaping my budget before. I have the same problem with ING that everyone else has mentioned, but like someone upthread said, it’s really ING’s problem, not Mint’s, and my ING savings balance doesn’t change often enough that I need a daily update on it. Once or twice a month is fine. My only gripe about Mint is that I can’t add my mortgage lender so I can put that in the debt section. All my other accounts are in there though, including my small credit union that I use for my primary checking. I was never able to use Quicken Online because my credit union wasn’t recognized by them!
I Like Mint, until it entirely stopped working with Chase, where I have 5 accounts and 2 credit cards. It hasn’t updated in 2 weeks. I have a years worth of information in Mint and no way to keep it updated. Sigh. Until they fix these things there is no way that I could recommend it to anyone.
April
Why did you stop downloading your account transactions? Sounds like you had a good system that was working for you, but you lost a little discipline, and now that you’re a few months behind you percieve it will take too long to catch up. Maybe all you need to do is break the task down into manageable steps (do one month per night for a few nights) to get caught up, and accept that your tracking might not be perfect due to the passage of time (the perfect is the enemy of the good, as JD wrote recently). I would only switch to another system if the benefits outweighted the disadvantages and risks.
We subscribe to the KIS principle (keep it simple) in as many areas of life as possible, including tracking our finances. It is a very low-tech approach – basically a spreadsheet and a checkbook. I record all of our income and non-credit card expenses in the checkbook, which takes a few minutes every couple of days. Once a month I enter all of these transactions into a spreadsheet, along with transactions from our credit card statements; this generally takes about 2 hours. Because we are fairly disciplined in our spending and generally withdraw the same amount each week, we don’t feel it is necessary to summarize expenses more than once a month, although we could if we chose to.
Spreadsheets are easy to use and very flexible, and allow us to set up customized reports.
Best of all, though, there is no risk that our bank information and passwords will get stolen, and no frustration with things like ING accounts not updating.
JS
Mint is pretty good, but if you do a lot of business with a credit union, you’re pretty much out of luck so far as tracking your finances with those establishments. I have a car loan through a local credit union that I’d like to keep closer track of, but Mint doesn’t support it.
So does Mint track investments like IRAs/401(k)s or let you add asset (car, home) or liability accounts?
I was going to upgrade to Quicken 2010 since my 2006 won’t update automatically anymore, but this might be a good alternative to try.
As “John Steed” above, says, this is an area where the more simplicity you can have in your life, the better. A few weeks ago, my Dear Husband asked me to give him an idea of how our joint funds get expended (I keep that checkbook and pay the bills, he just makes periodic deposits). Using our tax records and my ring binder where I keep the current expenses, it took only an hour or so to work up a table showing what we were spending monthly and yearly based on the last two years. Of course, that didn’t cover every penny we’re spending/investing, but it was all I needed for that question…
one of the benefits of getting beyond debt and closer to JD’s third level (I think it is) is that you don’t need daily details of every penny….
I’m pretty techno-savvy, but I can’t see the point of these programs.
I just enter whatever I spend into an Excel spreadsheet every day.
The spreadsheet has my budget and all my spending categories, my investments’ current and historical values, and all my credit card and bank account levels. I also keep my checkbook register on the spreadsheet.
Some days I have 3-4 receipts to go through and enter, but most days I have either one item or nothing. I work all day every day on a computer, so it’s really simple to just open the spreadsheet & update it if I spend/invest something.
I check my spreadsheet’s numbers against my online bank and investment accounts, and my online credit card accounts, once per week. I don’t bother looking at the statements from these–they only come once per month and they are a week out of date then–I just file the hardcopies just in case.
I agree with car loans being hard to track online—so I paid mine off. Much better to do that than keep paying that interest anyway.
I’ve been using Mint for several months now and find it very useful. Personally I don’t understand the “all or nothing” mentality some of the previous posters have about it. Like others, the ING issues occurred for me as well, but instead of throwing in the Mint towel and going back to my grueling spreadsheets I just check Mint and my ING accounts separately and that’s that. Perhaps if all our other accounts weren’t easily updated on Mint I would feel differently, but checking two places instead of one is much preferable to me than spending quality time with Excel.
People have raised some good questions about the connection with Intuit and if things were to change drastically I guess I’d be going back to doing my own number crunching. But as is, I like being able to easily get a picture of our net worth and create budget categories personal to our household. I also like Mint’s iPhone app.
So do you make all of your purchases using a debit card or credit card? That’s what messes me up — what if I use cash for something? How does Mint help me factor this into my budget?
The other reason I prefer using Quicken on my computer is that I can enter transactions before they happen (rather than on Mint, where you have to wait for it to show up — I enter in receipts when I get home with them). Or has this changed now on Mint?
I absolutely love Mint. It’s totally revolutionized our family’s finances. One of our major financial problems was that I handled all of the money and my husband didn’t want to be involved in any part of it, so I felt the entire burden. Well, now he gets the alerts and can check in our accounts without having to ask me if we have enough money for something. I have only good things to say. I check it every day, so I know the category for my atm withdrawals. but I’ve also made a new category called “Allowance” or “Mad Money” to account for the little things that I spend cash on. Mostly, I just try to use my debit card so that it automatically tracks the expenses.
I have been a user of mint for some time now, but it cannot connect to my primary bank at all Charter One (now owned by Citizens bank). I am so irritated by this that now, I am planning to close my account there and move to an account that mint can connect to :)
I was a regular Quicken user since 1997 and really liked it. When I bought a new Mac in August I had hoped I would be able to upgrade to the most recent version of Quicken for Mac but I had too many problems with translations and importing old data. So I chose iBank and have been very happy with it. My accounting & bookkeeping needs are simple and iBank does a great job for me.
You’re not likely to fare better with Mint that Yodlee as far as ING is concerned. ING doesn’t like the security implications of giving aggregators your login info. But somehow Mint seems to get it working again. Very frustrating when it doesn’t work, though. I do like Mint’s interface, however.
I tried Wesabe too. It has some neat features, like being able to enter cash transactions or enter transactions manually. However, I am not as crazy about the tags instead of categories, or the way that Wesabe graphs things.
At the moment, I am really digging MoneyWell, a Mac app for tracking finances that lets you track all transactions in accounts, but budgets like the envelope system. I’ve also heard good things about YNAB, but was waiting to see version 3, which will work on Macs.
@Caitlin and @Kate – Thrive (www.justthrive) supports most Canadian banks! Like mint.com, Thrive is a free personal financial software tool, and we also provide personalized financial advice, for free!
Shoot us an email at support@justthrive.com if you run into any trouble.
@Karen,
One thing I like about Mint (or other similar personal finance/budgeting systems) is that I don’t have to keep track of all of the reciepts. Since my wife and I have joint accounts it’s easier to have the one program that collects everything instead of having her update when she buys groceries, goes out, etc. and then having me keep my transactions updated. Neither one of us is very good at doing it separately and usually worse trying to do it together. Mint collects the transactions and we can categorize them how it fits us. It’s not perfect but it’s easier than our old spreadsheet and lets us focus on other things.
I’m not trying to say your system doesn’t work (in fact I used that system fairly well in college), just pointing out what the benefits are for me.
YES! ING was impossible to work with in the beginning when I tried to add it (about 5 months ago) to MINT. However – instead of using your account number – use the USERNAME you can set up. For instance – instead of 555666797979797 I can use my pre-determined user name of surfingwaves AND THAT made alllll the difference. BTW – these are examples – not REAL user information ;-)
HTH,
SoCal
I really liked Mint but since I’ve moved to ING’s Electric Orange checking, the update problems just make it too frustrating to use.
I’m thinking of using it just to track my debt and investments though; it has no problem with those accounts, and as such gives me a decent snapshot of my net worth.
I got Mint to work with my USAA for a while, and was liking it. But it quit, I got it restarted I believe three times. That’s about one or two too many. I wonder if maybe it’s the random security questions USAA asks on occaison. So I wrote it off as “you get what you pay for”.
@Elisa@Thrive
Thanks for the recommendation, but the site requires you to enter a 5 digit Zip Code. Not exactly Canada-friendly. Any ideas for getting around that?
I deleted my Mint account since there is a security issue when using the account as a household budget account. I started using Quicken and it does exactly what I need it to do, no problems with connecting to any accounts, secure multiple user accounts and budgeting. I still use Yodlee for my personal budgeting and since Yodlee is the backbone of Mint… why use Mint.. because of the web2.0 interface?! I still feel unsave using Mint Im sad to hear you moved to Mint since you introduced me to ING and Yodlee.
How is Mint less secure than Yodlee? You give them both the same information, and if Yodlee is the backbone, then Mint is just as secure.
I like Mint, but wouldn’t depend on them for their alerts to be timely, especially low balance ones. By the time I get one of those from Mint, it’s too late.
@Kate
Sorry about that! Most Thrive users are in the US, and we use the zip code to recommend banks that are close to them geographically. Since you’d probably be ignoring this information anyway, feel free to enter 90210, or whatever US zip code you feel suits you best!
Feel free to email me directly at elisa@justthrive.com if you have any questions!
I’ve tried Mint and now I’m using Quicken Online (who I’ve heard bought Mint). I like Quicken Online because I can choose my categories, it updates quicker than Mint and seems more user friendly. My hope is they will be combined taking the best of both.
I love using MoneyDance. http://www.moneydance.com
It’s Linux based and the interface isn’t incredibly intuitive.. it actually reminds me a bit of FileMaker. However, it does have great budgeting, account tracking, and category features and plenty of graphs (I’m a very graph-based budgeter).
I’m very wary of allowing third parties to access my info, so a clean, no-frills way of tracking it on my hard drive is what I want and have found.
Interesting. I just decided to try Yodlee and am fairly happy w/ it, though it does have problems with our USAA account. I was originally leaning towards Mint, until they were acquired by Intuit (Quicken). Now it’s a wait-and-see to see what will happen there. I used to like Quicken, but last few releases – not so much. Thus giving Yodlee a try. Wesabe sounded tempting, but wouldn’t handle our various investment/retirement accounts – so that nixed that.
If GnuCash ever gets a better UI, we may switch to that (desktop app)
Mint is a great tool if you are a.) using it regularly and b.) are only using it to track one individual’s accounts. It is not so great for couples who have decided to “join [financial] forces”.
For instance, my husband and I both have individual and joint accounts at Wells Fargo and ING Direct. I originally had the Mint account…so we decided to just add his accounts and share a login. All fine and dandy except that the joint accounts show up twice. Which messes everything up. I haven’t figured out a way to remove the extra instance of our joint accounts.
I’ve begged them to figure out a way to fix this, but seeing as they still haven’t added my credit union (where my car loan is) in over 2 years, I am not holding my breath.
Does anyone else have any couples budgeting applications they can vouch for? My excel spreadsheets will be the death of me, I swear! :o)
“I haven’t tracked our expenses since June.”
And yet here you are, doing OK.
This is why I never understand why people put so much effort into budgeting — because the lack of doing it never seems to show any real negative effects.
I’m hearing great things about Mint, but I just don’t trust it yet, just like I was reluctant to begin online banking. It takes time. Also, I think it forces a person to spend less when they have to keep track of everything on their own. In other words, don’t buy anything and you won’t have to track it. :)
@Tyler–Sure, I’ve survived, but I also found out that our expenses in a couple of areas started to creep up, something I would have caught if I had been tracking our expenses. It wasn’t going to ruin us financially, but it was more than we wanted to spend, and keeping it in check increases what we can save.
I wasn’t initially sold either but Mint ended up alerting me last month of an unwarranted Bank of America withdrawal and fee — and this was three days before the bank followed up with me. Long story short, Bank of America had withdrawn $750 to cover overdraft and late fees of an already-closed/non-existant BoA account of mine. I personally check my account every day but in this particular case, the BoA withdrawal happened to be the exact same ammount as my rent check so I had overlooked it. It seemed weird that the amount had no check image when I checked online but it didn’t concern me too much. Mint alerted me of the unusual withdrawal and the fee — something that might have gone unnoticed. BoA eventually refunded me all of the money.
So Mint can actually help you keep tabs on the banks!
Initially I had issues with Mint because it wouldn’t connect to my credit union which holds my mortgage loan. Then there were little nits here and there, like not connecting to ING Direct consistently. So I would track everything in Quicken…manually. After years of using Quicken, I thought why switch now and make exceptions for the new tool. But I was already making exceptions with Quicken; I took so much time to account for everything manually. Now I realize how much time Mint has freed up and it does everything for me. Also, the supposed exceptions I would have to make turned out to be minuscule anyway.
My work has our 401k through Fidelity which has a really cool financial overview tool that was able to pull in my car loan, student loans, bank accounts and credit cards to show me my networth in a snapshot picture.
Doesn’t help with budgeting but I’ve found Excel is the only tool flexible enough to do what I need in a simple way.
I’m also a recent convert to Mint and I don’t think I’ll be going back to manual transactions again.
Security – I’m really not too concerned here anymore. I don’t view it as any more dangerous than doing any online banking.
ING Direct – Connectivity here is still bad, but it’s not Mint’s fault, it’s ING. I’m lucky to get those accounts to update once a month in Mint. If ING wasn’t so great, I would have dropped them by now. Hoping this gets resolved somehow, it’s quite annoying.
Cash – if you want to track ‘every penny’ you won’t like Mint. You can’t enter cash transactions. I decided to just let cash live in it’s own general expense category and live with it.
Overall, it’s worth it to me to save all the time I save with Mint and to get updated account info in one place. If you have a cash buffer in your account and are Internet savvy, Mint can save you lots of time.
Does it bother anyone else that there isn’t a “Savings” category on Mint? Only investments. I categorize it under “Kids” just for fun, because I know I will not be using that category for a while.
The more I use it, the more I like it. It will be nice to compare year over year expenses in 2010.
I’ve been with Mint for a while and the biggest issue I see is that more of my financial institutions are now blocking Mint ala ING so for me Mint is becoming unusuable.
I have a 401K account, one credit card, and one credit union that Mint either no longer supports or the financial institutions blocks Mint on purpose. All of that within the last nine months.
Not to mention that Mint’s customer service for answering questions and returning emails borders on atrocious.
If all of your finances are Mint accessible than Mint go be a good tool to help. It’s not the end all be all, but as more and more financial institutions block Mint you will find that Mint may be become useless.
Mint.com is a great tool and offers many resources that users will find a lot of value. I would like to offer another alternative. BudgetPulse.com is a manual personal finance software that does not sync bank or credit accounts with at all. We are extremely easy to use as well like Mint and you can import your financial bank statements in minutes and export them as you please. We also have a savings goals function where you can set a public goal and email it out to family and friends asking for donations. Then they can directly contribute money to you via PayPal, Amazon, or money that is pledged. If anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me.
Craig Kessler
Marketing Director at BudgetPulse
craig@budgetpulse.com
I use Gnucash to track my money. I have only 1 check account and 1 credit card so I think it simplifies my work. I have tried a lot of things but Gnucash was the only one that I could track all my finances in a whole month :) I’ve tried Money, Excel, Google Docs, paper and so on, and now I know that the best one is the software that works for you :) Gnucash is the better to me :P
@58 Tamara – YNAB 3.0 is supposed to drop this month. I’ve been waiting for this one for awhile too. I like the platform-independent nature, and all the new features that are coming.
On top of that, Jesse’s customer service is first rate – something that seems to be far too rare online. He practices what he preaches, and plows a healthy chunk of the proceeds from YNAB sales right back into the product.
Jeez….I sound like a sales letter – don’t mean to. I just like the guy and his product that much.
I have long wanted to join Mint but it seems that they can only track US bank account which, sadly, makes it a bit useless if you are not American.
Does Mint provide cash-flow forecasting?
I’m a huge YNAB fan too – it took me a little while to tweak it to suit me, but now that I’ve got it sorted out I find it’s great. (I can’t wait for YNAB 3!) I looked into Mint but I think the YNAB philosophy of getting to the point where you’re spending last month’s income makes it a way better tool overall, and worth the cost of the software.
That said, I think the point is that you should use whatever works for you. For some people, that’s just a pen and a notebook, for others, it’s not budgeting beyond the 60/40 splits.
I tried Mint for a short period. Although I liked the interface, there were several things that turned me off to it.
1. Doesn’t support a lot of banks. Both my local credit union, and the small community bank I just joined are unsupported. Now that they’ve been acquired by Intuit, this problem may get solved, but I won’t know, because I can’t check which banks are supported unless I sign up again.
2. Doesn’t support the envelope system of budgeting.
3. In fact, I’m not sure what system of budgeting it is using. The figures for “amount left over” in each category were somewhat close to what they should have been, but not right. Never could figure out what special algorithm they are using, and I’m not sure why they decided that simply adding and subtracting wouldn’t be good enough.
My finances are complicated, so the solution to managing them must be complex. The idea behind Mint is nice, but I feel much more clear about what I’m doing if I put my own budget in a spreadsheet on Google Docs and track transactions in Quicken 2009. Quicken supports all of my financial institutions and because I have a recent version, it downloads all of the transactions directly.
I also use Quicken for envelope budgeting. All my envelopes are virtual envelopes that make up the balance of one big checking account. I tag each transaction in Quicken to designate which envelope the money is coming out of (or going into). For big deposits (such as paychecks), I split the transaction and tag amounts that correspond to my budget. With a couple of mouse-clicks I can see how much money is left in each “virtual envelope”. The total of all the envelopes is the balance of the account.
I’ve been using Mint for a while now and like it mostly for the one stop snapshot of all of my accounts since it actually has correct information. I also use Money and it has problems with correctly calculating my investments, so they are always wrong. Mint can also connect to my employers 401k program (Mint is the only one that I’ve found that can get this info), so I know what that balance is too. My biggest frustration, like many other, is with ING, but since it works OK with Money and that is where I do my budgeting and forcasting, it’s OK as long as Mint can get an update from ING once a month. I’d love to find one program that does it all, but alas.. I’m still looking.
I tried Mint in the past but they were always having issues with ING Direct (my main checking account at the time) and Sallie Mae. Now that I recently switched bank, I reinstated Mint and haven’t had any issues.
I like Mint for a snapshot of my financial life, less for the details. It is nice to see almost all of my accounts on one page.
I use a lot of USAA services and have been able to get most of them to work once I set up the security questions exactly like the 3 selected within each account (one for my wife, one for me). Checking, savings, investment accounts all seem to work. I cannot get USAA credit card account to link up, though. Chase works well. Federal TSP works. TIAA-CREF and Metlife work. They have access to my credit union but my account details are not working – Pentagon Federal CU. It also does not classify investments intelligently, just in a very rudimentary way. ETFs based on non-stocks are treated as a mutual fund just like stock funds. Overall, though, not bad for free!
I wish I could you Mint, as it seems to be pretty convenient, and there’s something about it that appeals to me, however mint doesn’t support my bank.
So until it does, it looks like more spreadsheets… or maybe I’ll just try a mint alternative.
One thing I really like about Mint is that now, instead of looking in my checkbook to see how much money I have, I look at Mint instead and see how much I’ve spent in each category… for example, if I want to go out to eat or buy some extra toys for my dogs, instead of looking at my check book balance and thinking “cool, $300, more than enough” instead I look at Mint and if the budget for dining out or pet supplies is already depleted or close to maxed, then I won’t spend the money.
However, I agree with what some others have said about the way it handles ‘income’ categories and how it handles credit card transactions and payments.
Haven’t tried Mint, but it sounds like a useful service to me.
John DeFlumeri Jr.
I am pretty sure every time ING notices that your ip address changes substantially when trying to log in, it hits you up with a couple of security questions. This would happen if you are accessing the website from say home and work. Now an online service like Mint surely uses many different servers with different addresses. Add this to your own personal use, and I could see how ING might be prompting nearly every time you login because of the myriad of computers/ip address blocks trying to access your account.
I quit using mint.com after one of my credit cards was cancelled and I had a new one issued… the tracking got screwed up and I didn’t feel it was worth the time to correct it all.
I like the acronym K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid)…. Mint.com was becoming more complex and I did not like it anymore. Plus, after tracking my expenses for nearly two years, I figured I had a good idea what my spending habits were like.
In case it wasn’t mentioned… Intuit (makers of Quicken) has purchased Mint:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/business/smallbusiness/03mint.html?8dpc=&_r=1&pagewanted=all
PS, giving my Bank password to another entity does not sound smart to me. Even if they say they dont transfer money. It takes just one hacker or breach of security or one bad employee, and then you are toast.
Joe, do you not use online banking at all then?
Afterall, one hacker could hack ING or BoA or USAA and then you’d be fried right?
I guess I just don’t see the distinction.
Mint is very upfront about security. They even tell you how the servers are stored in a security guarded facility with biometric authentication protocols.
I trust ING Direct but I have no idea if their servers are protected by guards. And they’re my actual bank!
This is going to read like an ad for Mint, but I swear I’m not on their payroll.
I’ve been using Mint for over a year and I love it. It works with all of my accounts: Bank of America, ING, Chase, Amex, National City, Countrywide (before and after they were bought by BofA), Fidelity and even shows the estimated value of my home.
There are certain times of day when some accounts will not update, but most of the time, they all update without problem.
I use rewards credit cards to purchase most everything and pay off the balances every week or so. Because of this, Mint tracks nearly all of my spending. I love it because it’s so simple and easy to budget using Mint.
Bank of America has similar features to Mint. Both use the Yodlee backend. I check both daily, but actually prefer Mint because it lets me do more with budgeting. It also has a great iphone app.
Mint looks like a great service, I signed up when I first came across it a few months ago but unfortunately it only supports US financial institutions so as an Aussie I am left mintless :)
Does anyone know of any comparable services that are available in the AU?
One interesting service that I discovered a while ago is moneytracking | http://www.moneytrackin.com/ | while it is not as advanced as Mint, it is very user-friendly and a good way to keep track of spending.
Guys, Mint no longer uses Yodlee (or, if it still does, it won’t for long) — Mint was purchased by Intuit (ie, Quicken), and will use Intuit’s backend:
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2009/11/12/intuit-exec-explains-what-quicken-users-can-expect-from-mint-com/
“Another big change is that Mint will no longer be powered by Yodlee’s aggregation platform that supports about 12,500 financial institutions, but instead by Intuit’s own platform that supports 14,000 institutions.”
Not saying it’s a positive or negative, but touting Yodlee to defend Mint no longer applies.
I have never used online budgeting software (although I am strongly tempted to); like you, however, I’d be very hesitant to use anything that pulls info from my bank account (in fact, I’m not even sure the feature would work with a Swiss bank).
With that said, I generally like using Web 2.0 applications, so I’ve been thinking of looking up an online expense tracking system that I’d update manually. Provided that I don’t fall into the same trap as you (i.e., not updating the database for a month), I reckon I should be fine.
I’ve been using Yodlee for a couple of years and have been on Mint about a year. The things I like about Mint over Yodlee are the interface and the separation of brokerage type account transactions from household transactions. However, in the things that really matter like dependable updates, tracking rewards, and being able to access my primary credit card, Mint is decidedly worse than Yodlee. Further the customer service at Mint has been nothing short of abyssmal. Perhaps with the purchase by Intuit, Mint can afford some CSR capable of fixing the issues. Until that time, I’m sticking with Yodlee.
I’ve been using Mint for 6 months now to track both mine and my wife’s accounts and credit cards. It does this just fine and I am happy with it. I would like a couple more features added…
1) Track my credit rating
2) Track my Frequent Flyer Miles
3) Allow me to create budget simulations for long term saving goals.
4) Allow me to break down my paycheck so I know how much I spend on healthcare, employee stock plan, taxes etc. (Gross vs net)
I tried Mvelopes and it was good but why pay 100+ a year?
I tried BofA’s portfolio manager and it’s alright.
All in all Mint is great for what I need it for.
I don’t have any answers, but appreciate the post as I’m still trying to figure out what to do with 5+ years of data from an old version of MS Money that I’d like to transfer to a new program that works on our new Mac. Until I figure that out, I can’t get rid of our 2002 Dell :(
I think that the future of these applications is that they’re definitely going to be moving online to a “software as a service” mode, but I’m not sure if now’s the time to make that jump from a desktop to an online version.
One thing that I use Money heavily for is cash flow projections… does anyone know if any of the s/w mentioned manage that especially well?
I guess I’m chiming in rather late, but I’ve had a lot of success with Mint over the past 6 months. While I thought I had been pretty vigilant in checking my monthly statements, Mint’s analysis tools identified several “mystery” items. One of them ended up being an illegitimate charge, and I was able to easily have it removed. For me, the $30 was well worth the trouble of keeping my accounts synced with Mint.
I used Mint for over a year, then my credit union decided to block Mint, but not Quicken. But Quicken doesn’t support my IRA account . Early next year I’m switching credit unions to take advantage of rewards checking account (4.0% interest). By early next year, my employer will offer direct deposit (finally!) and it’ll all be good, except for the IRA account.
I am based in the UK and have wanted to try Mint for a while. I was worried about the security of these sites before, but as you stated “Mint has a read-only connection to your bank; there’s no money transfer in Mint”.
I have tried Kublax in the UK but did not find it user friendly.
I have now signed up to a new company called Money Dashboard. They are new to the UK market but appear to be the UK equivilant of Mint in the US.
They also use Yodlee, so I am happy with the overall security.
Thay are in Beta at the moment but they are getting a lot of good press already.
If you are UK based and want to manage your money I would highly recommend signing up at http://www.moneydashboard.com
I have another manual tool to suggest called DebtSpark (http://www.debtspark.com). A few people have mentioned that Mint is a good starting off point, but I think the system is too complex for a budgetary beginner.
This site gives you a quick and easy snapshot of your financial picture (you enter the basics: income, expenses and debt, which you can track over time).
It seems like a lot of the sites out there are doing more and more (impressive!) but simpler can be better for basic financial assessment.
I love mint. It is a great first step for any person that thinks they are not organized enough to budget properly. It makes it fun to save.
I have friends who keep telling me to sign up for mint…and I just can’t do it. I use Quicken and when I didn’t have Quicken, I downloaded from my bank to a spreadsheet and categorized it that way. Better for my piece of mind.