Mint: Free online personal finance

Mint Finance I really like mint. Not the web stats app, the new personal finance app. It’s extremely simple to use, automatically pulling in information from your bank and credit card accounts, updating itself when you’re not even using it.

It’s completely free and smartly monetized through mutually beneficial offers from the site’s partners — telling you, based on your actual spending, how you can save money. For example, it’ll tell you what banks offer higher interest rates for your spending. It’ll tell you what credit cards have better rewards or lower interest than yours. It erroneously told me how to save $80 per month on my internet service by switching to Verizon. Unfortunately those regular $100 payments to Yahoo! weren’t ISP payments like it assumed but Yahoo! Search Marketing deposits.

Full, searchable transaction history and spending trends round out a nice feature set. With categorization and labeling of those transactions, it’s easy to see where you spend your money and how that spending changes over time.

I said I really like mint. I’d love it if they added loans. The cash vs. debt balance information is something more people need to be aware of, but without including loans, you don’t get the full picture. I especially need my outstanding student loans in there to really understand my financial situation. I put in a request already just to add my support for the feature… although it’s probably often requested already since it was a category on the contact form.

Posted on October 2, 2007 in Personal

More from this category

  • http://www.mysiteonline.org/ Brendon Kozlowski

    What do you think about this product (awesome, thanks!) and the one I found awhile ago, but is a paid-for-product?
    http://www.mvelopes.com/

    I haven’t tried mvelopes, but I’d still be interested in what you think from seeing their demo movie. How secure would you say Mint is?

  • http://www.CleverTools.com Jason

    Mint is very secure an uses the same backend technologies that banks do. Take a look at there safety page here: http://mint.com/safe.html

  • http://www.randomjabber.com Deron Sizemore

    I read about Mint the the other day. Looks good, but I’m still not sold on the idea. First thing that comes to mind is security. It seems that they need access to nearly every account that you own to really get the most out of the service and I’m not to keen on handing over any, let alone, all of my financial account credentials.

    I could be wrong on this (correct me if so) but it seems my online banking can do most of what Mint can do? Mint seemed like a way to organize everything in pretty graphs, which I don’t really need to see where my money is going.

  • http://www.dbstract.com Roger Stringer

    I’ve been interested in mint, but their decision to allow only users from the US to sign up, kind of hampers their effectiveness in terms of testing the site out.

  • http://www.dangrossman.info Dan

    Considering they don’t yet support even 1/3rd of the bank sites in a single country, how could they possibly open to other countries?

  • http://www.CleverTools.com Jason

    Deron,

    Actually your online banking cannot unless every credit card you have is through the same bank. Also, my bank (Wells Fargo) cannot tell me what the average spending is for people my age in my area.

    Mint sends me alerts if funds are low, if there are abnormal charges, and even reminds me when my credit card payments are due. It also allows me to see a snapshot of my finances all in once place which is nice.

    Considering that they are built on the same backend technology and security that your bank uses, I don’t see why you should be scared to use them. Maybe thats just me though.