A Look at Mint.com

I’ve been using Mint.com for over a year now and it seems like a good time to walk through the features and offer up my “likes” and “dislikes”.

Let me start out by saying that there is no question I like this application. It’s clean, it works and it’s causing us to watch our finances closer than we ever have before. Why? Well, let’s look at some of the features:

The Overview Tab
My favorite feature on Mint.com is the page that loads when you log in. They call it the Overview screen. I call it my financial dashboard. On one page I have a quick view of all my account summaries, my budget and what has been spent against it for the month, alerts that highlight any potential problems and major financial changes, my portfolio “movers and shakers”, a quick view of my assets and my “trends”. I watch my trends data very closely because it shows me my total income and my total expenses. In just one quick view I can see if we are spending too much for the month, or are on track. They have a nice bar chart that clearly shows whether you are spending more than you are bringing in and exactly how much.

The Transaction Tab
I spend a lot of time on the transaction tab as well. On this page you can see the details of every electronic expenditure and every electronic deposit to your accounts. You can also categorize each expense so that it drops in to each of the budget items you are tracking. I liken it to your checking account register on steroids. This transaction tab is a consolidation of all of your accounts. As an example, I have Paypal, and my credit union accounts all feeding in to this screen.

The Planning Tab
This is where you set up your budget that shows up on the Overview tab. Here you can also see how your particular expense stacks up against other people across the country.

The Trends Tab
Mint has built some very nice graphical charts. The Trends tab is no exception. They split all of your expenditures, income, net income, assets, debts and net worth in to a series of charts so that you can visually see how you are doing. Some things are displayed as bar charts, such as your spending over time, while others are pie charts such as spending by category. In each case you can click on the graphics to drill back down to the details that make up the numbers. You can view charts for a particular month, a set of months and even an entire year.

The Investment Tab
The Investment tab lets you add your investments and track them in a series of charts etc. You can see how your investments are fairing relative to various indexes and you can also see the price of your shares, number of shares, price paid and market value. I tend not to use this page too much because my main focus of Mint is to track my monthly budget. I’m sure others get a lot more use out of this page.

The Ways to Save Tab
The last tab is one that I’ve spent almost no time on. Mint’s business model is to analyze your income and expenses, look at the types of accounts you have and then estimate the savings you can realize by switching to one of their partners. I am obsessively loyal to the companies that I do business with, such as my local credit union. I also don’t like applying for and maintaining many credit cards so I’m very hesitant to sign up for any of the promotions on Mint. I’m sure others have yielded some of the estimated savings by switching, but I’m not in that camp.

Security
I think the thing that most people would find the hardest to accept about this application is that you have to come to terms with entering your username and passwords for all of your financial institutions. Mint recognizes this concern and has gone to great lengths to alleviate your fears. You can check out their privacy page for detailed information about what types of security they use: http://www.mint.com/privacy/

Other Platforms
One other feature that I also really like is the Iphone integration. Mint has an Iphone/Ipod Touch application that gives you the same kind of visibility right on your Iphone. For security, they give you the ability to set a pin on the Iphone app so it won’t display any data without a valid pin. Hopefully that will protect my privacy in the event of my Iphone being stolen.

Summary
I find Mint.com to be invaluable to our household budget these days. It doesn’t do everything, but what it does do, it does very well. Having one place to instantly have a snapshot of your finances is motivating and provides just the kind of visibility everyone should have on their finances.