First Impressions: Mint
For months I have been sworn to secrecy being an early user of Mint, a cutting-edge money management web application aimed at helping college students and the like get a hold on their finances. Now I can open my mouth as Mint has been released to the public. I have written a few things regarding maintaining your finances in college for Mint’s blog in the past and have definitely seen Mint go from a flaky app to something I can trust. You might remember I visited Mint’s offices in Mountain View over the summer.
First off, let me tell you about Mint’s security. After having talked with several Mint employees early on, I voiced my concerns about users not wanting to use Mint due to the nature of the application - dealing with sensitive information and bank accounts. They assured me that they do not store any of your bank information permanently and they utilize the services of a company that specializes in interacting with banks and credit card companies.
Mint 101
Mint is free but makes commission when analyzing your finances and suggesting offers tailored to your spending habits. The real draw of Mint is the intuitive interface and more importantly “ohh pretty charts!”.
Mint attempts to properly categorize your transactions but gets it wrong quite often, as referenced by the chart above claiming I spent over $1,000 on groceries in July. Luckily, it is quite easy to recategorize transactions. You can search for specific transactions as well.
Thoughts
The primary draw of Mint aside from the pretty visuals is the ability to tie in all of your bank and savings accounts in one place, instead of having to check several websites. Unfortunately, I have had a continual issue with Mint being behind on transaction history and displaying my balance incorrectly compared to directly logging into my Bank of America account. After talking with a friend about this, it seems to be an issue with the way Bank of America handles pending transactions. Regardless, the main thing I need to know is my balance and if Mint can’t get that absolutely, 100% correct I don’t know if I will be using it daily.
I could go on for hours describing Mint features and showing screenshots but I think it’s best experienced first hand. Setup a Mint account and let me know what you think.
It looks really cool, I just wish it had support for South Africa.
I was involved with the closed Beta for a long time but never really had a chance to play with it. It’s very promising — although now that I want to use it, it seems to be getting flooded with traffic and very slow. Woo..
I’ve been trying to use Mint for about a Month. It is still too full of bugs for me to use it as my primary financial tracker. And why can’t I create my own categories? Sometimes I get 20+ emails about transactions that happened months ago. I also would never entirely switch because I can’t bring in my legacy data that I have kept for the past 5 years. The “Ways to Save” is a nice feature though.
Overall it is still a toy and I can’t take it seriously.
I’ve been using Mint.com for a few weeks as a private beta invitee as well. While it hasn’t revolutionized my money management, it sure hasn’t hurt it. I still use my bank’s website for online bill payment. I also use it to get a better status of my funds. As a college student I need to know exactly how much (or little) I have at any time. Mint seems to be a little behind keeping my stats up to date. To be fair, I think I read on their website that they only update each account every 24 hours. I may be mistaken though.
In the future I really hope to see Mint.com evolve into an online banking replacement. It’s great now, but it would be wonderful to pay my bills through Mint rather than my bank. I’d then have a truly centralized money manager.
Great idea and something I would use if it had support for banks in Singapore.
I’ve been using their service for about a month and have only come across a couple of problems.
One notable problem is the emails that I’m getting about a deposit I made back on the fourth. I just searched Gmail, and it looks like I’ve got 20 emails that are the exact same — in that, they notify me that a large deposit was made on 9/4/07. How many times do they need to notify me? I visited the site a day or two ago and it seems to have stopped the annoying emails.
I believe I received over 10 text messages as well (of the same message above).
Other than that problem, the service is stunning and can only get better with more and more banks and creditors on their side with offers to switch accounts and such.
The service is no where near as good as the up to the second WellsFargo.com, but it is great indeed.
I tried using it but it got it wouldn’t get past the “Establishing a secure connection” for a B of A account. Anyone have this?
I’ve tried setting it up but it is having trouble connecting to my bank account. The error has been reported to Mint and I’m hoping they can correct it soon because I am excited to check this service out already…
The service looks amazing. I’m just hoping they’ll get my bank added to their list of participating banks. They have it, but it employs challenge questions when you log in from differing IP addresses from time to time. At one point, they had the challenge question logic built into the username and password area, but that wasn’t working, so they took that away. I’m still looking for them to make the announcement that they’ve corrected those issues.
So far we have had trouble setting up our accounts. We found Mint to be slow and often it fails to retrieve data. Hopefully its servers woes will be solved once the initial hype dies down. The biggest pluses are: its a FREE tool and its pretty. Also some of the features are really neat. Nice review!
Cheers,
FIRE Finance
How is this different from Wesabe (wesabe.com) ?
Mint looks really cool and something I will probably use, but I don’t think I could trust such private information with some website.
Hey, I don’t remember you taking that picture of me….
Any idea when they plan to support UK banking?
When I signed up for the beta I was under the impression that they’d be supported too.
Just adding the Credit Cards would be great for me.
I’ve been on mint.com for a little over a month now and though I don’t use it daily like I do with Wells Fargo b/c of the delayed updates/transactions, I see it becoming really handy and great in the future-and it’s purrty! I was a bit hesitant at first to put in my account info, but I felt pretty confident that I wasn’t gonna get screwed(I hope!) Nice review and I wish the team at Mint good luck in showing me more money!!
@Atish - I think it was after I commented on how many bottles you had. =)
I am loving this service. I have been a long time Quicken user, which was a nightmare to manage. Their mac edition was even worse.
Mint made it pretty simple. They can only do better from here.
See my review here:
http://abhishek.tiwari.com/2007/09/19/freshen-your-finances-with-mint/
The program looks beautiful, I’ll have to try it out. I just got Quicken 2008 FAR and upgraded to Deluxe, so my financial tracking is already pretty sweet, but it would be interesting to try this out, especially as it’s free. Looks like there are a couple features at least that Quicken doesn’t have (SMS alerts and more charts), but otherwise looks very similar.
I tried to use the beta, but they do not have my bank yet. However I can say that support was very quick in responding to me and letting me know that they will be trying to add my bank in the near future. Hopefully sooner rather than later, because I am really excited to use it. The interface is gorgeous.
Interesting idea, shame it doesn’t work in the UK. That said, I still stand by my comment back in March when you first mentioned Mint- the best way to save money- is not to spend it on “expensive crap I don’t need”.
http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/03/06/mymint-blog-goes-live-interviews-me/#comment-115051
Am I the only one wondering what Shaun Inman thinks of this name choice?
Looks like quite the cool service. Now it just needs to make its way up to Canada :-)
I really like the clean interface of the site. I like how easy it is to add accounts in with just your login info. I wish they would integrate brokerage accounts. Like in Bank of America’s “My Portfolio” I can add my Charles Schwab Brokerage and IRA, yet Mint doesn’t support this. Hopefully it will come out in the future of the site. I agree with the Bank of America issue, it doesn’t reflect the accurate account balance. I gave it a try, but I don’t think I’ll be using it regularly.