Errol Pierre-Louis |
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Mint.com by Errol Pierre-Louis Ratings: 4.5/5 [Editor's Choice] Bottom Line: Mint.com is a useful, intelligent, and free financial Web service that's simple to set up and tracks your monetary life with little intervention on your part. If you can get over the uneasiness about giving banking and credit-card account log-in credentials to a third-party site, you'll find the site quite handy. Pros: Free, easy way to stay on top of your finances. Mostly autonomous. Logs transactions. Sets up budgets. Sends alerts. Creates spending trend charts. Finds ways to save you money. Cons: Giving a third party sensitive financial info may make you uncomfortable. Can't change dates on transactions, which may throw off budgets. Full Review: Any financial adviser will tell you that the key to a healthy financial life is keeping track of where your money goes. You can't budget if you don't know how much you spend, where you spend it, how much you save, the amount of debt you need to pay off, and so on. The free Mint.com service can help you do exactly that. A single, intuitive platform lets you view your financial data from several sources, provides graphs and charts to monitor spending, alerts you to unusual spending behavior and upcoming due dates, and seeks money-saving offers for you. Best of all, it does its work automatically—all you do is enter your online bank and credit card account information and Mint takes care of the rest. We've already included Mint.com in our Best Free Software roundup, now let's take a deeper look at what this service has to offer. You can set up your Mint account in minutes, and the sign-up process is anonymous—it asks for an e-mail address, password, and ZIP code, but doesn't know your name, Social Security number, or any other identifying info. In fact, according to the company, it never has direct access to your accounts (the information comes from an account aggregation service) and can't retrieve that data. Once I signed up and entered the log-in info for my bank account and credit cards, the service combed through my financial information and displayed my assets and debts in total and for each account, categorized my transactions, set up budgets for me based on my buying habits, and created pie charts of my spending trends. Mint.com is mostly a hands-free app. It automatically syncs to your accounts and updates your information overnight and every time you sign in. For many people, the biggest deterrent to using Mint is apprehension about handing over bank and credit card information to a third-party site. So when CEO Aaron Patzer came to the PC Magazine offices I grilled him on how well the service secures sensitive information. Patzer said his operation employs bank-level data security and uses outside consultants to test the site for hacker resistance. Furthermore, though Mint asks for your bank log-in credentials, it doesn't actually save or store that information on its servers. It uses the same account-aggregation services as Bank of America and Fidelity to establish a one-way key with your financial institution. That lets the service download info but not move money around. Since Mint doesn't actually store the credentials that allow access to your financial accounts, neither its employees nor potential hackers can get at the information. In addition, the service itself is read-only—you can view your financial information, but you can't actually touch the money. With all these safeguards in place, I think the site is trustworthy. The site displays five tabs: Overview, Transactions, Trends, Ways to Save, and Accounts. You add your bank and credit card accounts through the Accounts section. Just click on add account and search for the financial institutions you use. Couples who want to track their household finances can add their individual accounts to one shared Mint account. If you're sharing a Mint account you can hide your partner's individual accounts to view only your financial information—this way you can see who's spending what. Joint accounts will appear as a single account, however. The Overview section, as you'd assume, gives you a quick glance at all your finances. It lists assets and debts on the right-hand side of the page. Your checking- and savings-account information is on top, and your credit-card debts are listed below. Beneath that, you'll see a financial health meter—a bar that displays your cash in green and debts in red. This graphic simplifies the information-gathering and analysis process. To come up with the same information on your own, you'd have to go through all your checking, savings, and credit-card accounts, add up your debt, and subtract that from your total assets. I appreciated the financial alerts and budget Mint set up for me once I created my account. The first time I signed on after that, three alerts were already posted at the top of the page: two regarding credit-card payments due in less than a week and one notifying me of unusual spending. You can always customize the alerts and add your cell-phone number to receive them via SMS as well—all for at no charge. You can also tell the site to send you weekly or monthly financial summaries. In the middle of the overview page you'll see the budget Mint automatically created for you based on your average monthly spending habits in different spending categories. For instance, the service automatically set up a grocery and shopping budget for me of $330 and $280, respectively, based on my spending history in those categories. You can always manually adjust your budget and add other categories you'd like to track in your budget. Each category is represented by a color-coded horizontal bar with a vertical line that shows where your spending should be at that point in the month to keep on target. The colors let you know how well you're following your budget. Green means you're okay. Yellow indicates that, at your current spending rate, you're in danger of exceeding your budget. Red tells you that you're over budget. Traditionally, setting up a budget is a hassle, as is following it—you have to save receipts, record all your purchases, and constantly calculate how much you have left. Since Mint sets up your budget initially, lets you easily customize it, and automatically logs every transaction, you might actually stick with your plan. Keep in mind, however, that Mint's budget plan is based on your average monthly spending and not on what you should be spending based on your income. So Mint's budget plan will help you make sure your spending doesn't stray from your usual habits, but might not be so helpful if you are already overspending in a particular area. If that's the case, you'll have to adjust the budget plan manually. Tracking Your Spending The Transactions section gives you a detailed look at your expenditures, broken down by category. Mint categorizes your noncash transactions automatically. When I bought a new pair of headphones with my Visa card, the service correctly logged the date and amount under the merchant name Best Buy and the category Electronics/Software. On the other hand, Mint logged lunch at the ESPN Zone under Home Furnishing, and it didn't categorize my rent checks at all. But while the service won't always get the category right, it's intelligent enough to adjust once you correct it. When it originally entered my rent check as Check with no category, I double-clicked the entry and made the merchant Rent under Mortgage/Rent, and from then on the service correctly handled the payments to my landlord. You can even create your own labels, which work the same as keyword tags, to search purchases by your customized tastes. Of course, Mint can't automatically track spending on those nights you walk into a bar with a pocketful of cash and leave with a pocketful of lint. But you can log cash transactions manually—you simply click on a cash withdrawal recorded in the transaction section under ATM, for instance, then use the Split function to record the amount you spent and assign it a merchant and category. You can search transactions for a particular merchant or category—a simple feature that makes Mint much more user-friendly than most online bank or credit-card sites. My online Visa account lets me view transactions strictly by date and statement period. American Express is a bit better; it allows me to search transactions, but not view by category. With Mint, I can easily see all my Amazon.com or food and dining purchases, which I can't do with my credit-card accounts. Mint doesn't have an option for viewing by date range, though, which would've been a nice touch. The transactions section is missing one major feature, though—unlike Quicken Online, which has a RealBalance feature that lets you add dates manually, Mint doesn't let you change transaction dates. Some transactions don't clear for a few days, though, and that delay can throw off your whole budget. For instance, if you buy a new jacket at the end of the month, but the purchase doesn't post until the next month, your budget will be messed up for both months. On the right-hand side of the transactions page you'll see a graph comparing your spending habits with those of all other Mint users. Under that you'll find an Interesting Facts section that, for a particular vendor, shows your total purchases, purchases per month, average purchase amount, and how much you spend monthly. You can convert your transaction history to a CVS spreadsheet file and export it to Excel by clicking on a link at the bottom of the table. The Trends section gives you a better overall idea of your spending habits. The top half of the page displays a pie chart, with each slice representing a spending category, so you can see how much you've spent by category during a specified time. Clicking on a slice lets you view a pie chart of that category broken into subcategories. Clicking on a slice of a subcategory lets you view a pie chart of merchants. The bottom half of the Trends section is your SpendSpace, where you can graph your spending habits by month and compare your graph with one showing the spending habits of Mint users in other U.S. states and cities. It's similar to the Interesting Facts table in the Transaction section, but more in-depth. SpendSpace lets you find out whether you're overspending or under-saving compared with others. So if you ever get the urge to see whether you spend more on office supplies than folks in Tucson, Arizona, Mint's got you covered. How Mint Can Save (and Make) You Money Mint not only lets you monitor your finances, it will also go through them and your spending habits searching for ways to save you money. The Ways To Save section compares the terms of your current financial accounts with those of other companies, looking at details like fees and minimum balances, to see if you can save money by switching. It determined that I'd save $233 a year by transferring my current checking account to E-Trade. It also went through my spending habits and discovered that by switching from my Chase Visa to a Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards Card, which gives bonus points for the groceries and pharmacies I frequent, I can save $97 annually. Mint ranks offers by how much they'll save you, and it shows only those that save you at least $50. The service earns a commission whenever users accept a sponsored offer in the Ways To Save section. The logos of sponsoring companies appear next to the offering listings. Mint reps told me the site shows a "mixture of sponsored and unsponsored results in order to be as objective in its recommendations as possible." Mint will soon be rolling out an Investment section that will let you track your entire stock portfolio. The new section of the site will show many different graphs and charts to give you an overview of how your investments are performing. It'll also expose fees and charges that tend to go unnoticed. You'll be able to compare individual investments against one another as well as against the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. As with the rest of the site, this section will give you the ease and convenience of seeing all your investments in one place instead of hopping from eTrade to Merill Lynch to Fidelity to wherever to keep track of your entire portfolio. In the future, Mint also plans to add sections to monitor your student loans and home mortgages. Since the setup is so simple and the service requires hardly any tinkering on your part, Mint makes monitoring your money almost effortless. The site also has a partnership with The Motley Fool to offer personal finance articles and tips. Mint.com definitely deserves the title of "Best Free Finance Software" we gave it in our free software roundup. Though Quicken and MS Money offer more features for professional users who need to fill out expense reports and such, the features Mint.com does offer free of charge are on a par with those offered by these premium financial software packages. I would recommend Mint to anyone looking for a hassle-free way to track personal finances. |