I have used Mint.com for the last couple of years. This Mint.com Review will focus on what I like, how I use it and what I don’t like. First, what is Mint.com? Mint is a free web-based personal finance management program. Mint basically uses Intuit as the back bone to collect data from all the accounts you link – bank accounts, credit card accounts, loans and investment accounts. So you will have all your account in one place. This has its own pros and cons.
Mint.com Review : Security
When I signed up for Mint, I didn’t think much about the security. But after I got married and when I tried to get my husband to sign up, he was very concerned about the security. He read every single word of their privacy/security policy and technology behind their security. We discussed about someone hacking and stealing out login from Mint.com. That is a very valid concern. But we finally decided to sign up due to the following reasons -
- We have a lot of accounts, it is impossible for us to check all the accounts frequently. So it one of those accounts get hacked and someone is going on a spending spree, it will take us a long time to wise up. If we could have everything in one place, I can check easily and I will know of any suspicious activity immediately.
- Most people use the same username/password for all their accounts. Just because it is easy to remember. If I were a hacker and if I hacked one account, I would try all the online banking site with the same username/password because, well… most people use the same login information.
I am not saying the previous 2 reasons should make you sign up for Mint.com. Think about your comfort level and decide based on what feels right for you.
Mint.com Review : Setting up
There are plenty of posts that gives step by step instruction on how to get started with mint, here is one from my favorite blog – getting started with mint. I will stop with saying the setting up part was a breeze. I did have some problems linking my Emigrant Direct accounts & Dollar Savings direct accounts as they have 5 security questions and keep changing what they ask. But after a couple of tries, I have everything set up and running. If your bank is not supported, let them know in the Mint communities section. I have not done that as all my banks were included, but I suppose they will try to include it.
Mint.com Review : Actual money management
Now that you are set up and ready. There are plenty of ways to use the aggregated data. I will go through the features that I use, one by one, starting with my favorite features – budgeting and goals.
Budgeting
As a default option, Mint.com provides you with a list of categories and recommended budget based on previous spending. With limited data, I found this first pass budget pretty much useless. For the first couple of months, I didn’t touch the budget. Instead, I just edited the categories to reflect our spending (for example, we don’t need a category “coffee”, so we removed it, but added “blogging” instead to keep a tab on what I spend to run this blog). After a couple of months we had a good idea of what we were spending on each category and set up a budget to restrict out spending.
Budgeting need not be complicated. For example, instead of having all these focused category – restaurant, gas, grocery… you could have just 3 or 4 category if you want – Need, Want, Save, Give. And chuck all the transactions of grocery, gas to Need and Restaurant to want, charitable donations to give… you get the idea.
Goals
Goals is another favorite feature of mine, that was added recently. You can create a goal and attach different accounts to it. For example, I have a “save for home” goal and I save for that goal in2 different banks. Mint combines them and shows how much money I have saved for the goal and whether I am on track to complete the goal in the time I set. It also has a nifty what-if feature to quickly see if I increase my savings by $x how much sooner I will be able to finish my goal. For each goal, they also provide with some information that will help with the goal. For saving for down payment goal, I saw – how much I can afford, determine credit score, home insurance information. You can create as many goals and see the progress in one shot.
Transactions
Transactions are as the name states, simply a list of all your transactions – incoming and outgoing. To make it more useful for the budgeting, you have to categorize them based on your preference. They have some default categorizing, but for the first few months, I had to keep fixing them. Then it sort of learned and doing a much better job. You can also tag each transaction. For example, it will be easier to tag all the business expenses as business, or “reimbursable” or whatever you want. I have “FSA” and “Taxes” that I use a lot. At the end of each month, I could filter the FSA transactions, so that I can file my claim. Same concept for taxes, during tax time, I can check all the “taxes” transaction to make sure I am not missing any deduction.
Trends
This is a snapshot of you spending over time – by category, by month or by tags. You can compare your spending with people from your city or what other people spend on certain category, but I don’t find this useful. What I do find VERY useful is the trend by category over time. It lets me budget for irregular expenses. My auto insurance premium is due in Aug, so my “Auto” expenses category shoots up around this time. This helps me budget for these type of expenses accurately. It can also give great insights on your own spending. We had a budget for eating out, but it turns out we always eat out a LOT during the holidays. So we had to factor this in our budget.
If you are someone who tracks their networth, Mint has a couple of cool graphs, they show networth and net income over time.
Investments
This is not a ground breaking feature or anything, but the colorful charts does make it fun. Mint.com shows graphical representation of the Performance, Value, Asset allocation and comparison (to S&P 500, Dow Jones & NASDAQ) over time. They also show the best performers, worst performers and biggest movers. I have not made any decision based on these, but it could give you an idea on how your portfolio as a whole is performing. Esp. if you have your assets spread across different companies.
Alerts
This is another useful little feature. You can set up an alert if you go over certain $x for different categories. I usually find the “fees charged” alert more useful than anything. I am supposed to look over all my statements to see if there are some sneaky fees. But this makes it super easy.
Ways to Save
I rarely use this feature. If you are wondering how Mint can give their software for free, this is the answer. They make recommendations for you to save money. They are actually ads. In their defense, they don’t push you to buy anything and if they are actually useful I wouldn’t mind trying out their ideas. But I have not found any good recommendations so far. May be I am too good 
Taxes
Mint partnered with Turbo Taxes this tax season to seamlessly integrate doing taxes. Out of curiosity, I tried using it, but got no where. I don’t know what the point of it is. I suppose if it is done correctly, it can seamlessly import my “taxes” transactions to Turbo Tax to make it easier for me? I like the idea. Hopefully by next tax season it will be fully functional and prove useful.
Mobile App
We recently bought Android phones and Mint.com App is one of the frequently used app. I understand we are exposing our data even more, but with adding a password layer on top of Mint password, we found it too convenient to pass. As with the web application, you can’t move money from within mint app, but for quick look at the budget and re-categorizing some transactions it works great.
Mint.com Review : Final word
It is easy, intuitive and presents data in a way that is more fun. I still check my accounts individually a lot, just because I like it. I would never just believe everything mint says, but I use it to check my accounts in one place and I can check my individual accounts less frequently than before. I also like the pretty charts that gives more insight into my spending. Overall, I like using mint for my money management.
Do you use Mint? Do you have any problems with Mint.com?
