I’ve been sitting on the sideline when it comes to signing up for an online tool that allows me to get a consolidated view of all my investment and bank accounts. The main reason is that I didn’t want to offer up my account logins for fear of creating extra drama in my life. I finally bit the bullet yesterday and am somewhat surprised at how well mint.com works.
I started by creating a personal unique login and password to the site. Once I was in, it was incredibly easy to see how you add accounts. There are large boxes on the screen that say, "Add an account". In most cases, adding an account is as easy as choosing your bank or financial institution and inputting your username and password. If your bank utilizes "challenge" questions for security, Mint gives you a drop down to choose which questions they ask. I was absolutely amazed to find that Mint supported both my company 401k and also my credit union. Wow.
Once I had all of my accounts linked up I spent some time wandering around the various report screens. It was great to automatically see where I spend my money and on what categories. Mint automatically assigned about 95% of my expenses to the correct categories. I spent about 10 minutes assigning the rest of them and asked Mint to remember how I categorized these expenses in the future. I’m guessing that I won’t have to do that much, except for the rare check that I write.
Overall, I’m very impressed with Mint. I’ll definitely use it.
So, what are it’s weaknesses? Well, I would really like to see them give users the ability to manually add in assets. At this point, it figures my net worth based on my investment balances and my mortgage balance. It doesn’t give me the ability to add the estimated value of my home or second home so I can’t see how my real estate holdings play in to my overall net worth. Hopefully they’ll add that feature in the future.
Is it safe? Based on what Mint.com says about privacy, I’m pretty comfortable with the security they have in place. They have multiple layers of protection including using encryption, and multiple third parties to validate their site security. Another reason I’m comfortable is that they don’t associate my name or other personal information with my account and don’t store that information on their servers. If someone gains access to my account, the only thing they can really do is see what I have in the accounts. They can’t even see the account numbers. You can read more about their privacy and security at: http://www.mint.com/privacy/
If you are looking for one place to aggregate your financial information, you should check out mint.com.
Disclosure:
(I’m a new user of Mint but I am not affiliated with them and do not receive any referral or kick back if you choose to use their site. I’m only giving you this information because I like the site. Everybody Loves Your Money is not responsible for your use of their site and takes no responsibility for your experience on mint.com)
I’ve tried wesabe, geezeo and mint, and overall, i like Mint the best. It’s layout is clean, and as you said, it’s simple to set up. The only negative I find is that the reporting (the pie chart) is sometimes not accurate… and also that, some of my bank records are updated as of the last business day… it’s not too big a deal, however, and I’ll definitely keep on using MInt for now :)
I’ve used Yodlee for a while and think they are too unreliable. I failed to make a payment about 4 months ago, because they did not show up in bills due and I could have missed a lot more, but realized they were missing before the due date.
I’ll give Mint a try and hope they are more reliable.
Mint seem to have a problem with adding BofA loans especially if you live in WA or ID. Apart from that, it’s a great tool!
Mint is definitely a quality site. I’ve been on it for a few months and it really helps to get a real picture of your financial situation. Getting started is a bit of a pain, entering everything and categorizing it, but it’s worth the work.
I have been using Mint for a few months now, and I love it. I think it is significantly better than other personal finance tracking applications like Wesabe or Yodlee. I like to see how my spending patterns change from month to month with the trends pie chart. I am also glad that they recently added the investment tracking feature. The one problem I have is that Mint does not allow me to add my mortgage. I got the mortgage through a state agency, and this is not available as an option. It would be nice to set up custom accounts to get an accurate depiction of Net Worth. I use Microsoft Excel to track my net worth now.
I am still concerned about how safe this is. The reason being that it takes all of your accounts. What happens if this business goes under. Then they have all of your personal information. For the time being I would rather pay for Quicken or something where I feel it is much more secure. I see that everybody has a positive opinion about it. I’m kind of conflicted as to what I need to do.
Sure…Mint doesn’t store your login, password, and any other credentials. They send it to a third party (Yodlee) who DOES store it. They can be hacked too, and they don’t need your name to type in an account number and password. From there they have complete access to your cash.
I don’t understand why everyone says Mint is so secure. It’s not any more secure than anywhere else. They just pass the buck to a third party and gloss over the fact. Your information is still stored on someone else’s servers.