With its debut at the TechCrunch conference two years ago, Mint has always yielded a mixed reaction from me. I’ve heard people raving about the free personal-finance Web site, which recently announced it was being acquired by Intuit (of Quicken fame). I liked the idea of a centralized spot to see my finances and budget at a glance. However, I also worried about giving so much information to one site.
I finally caved last week, and passed along my account log-ins to Mint and let it do its thing. It quickly (with one exception, which we’ll get to) pulled in balances from checking and savings account, retirement accounts and credit cards. As the past week and a half has tracked along, it has neatly filed my expenses into largely logical locations, and helped me build a budget based on my trends, and has already helped me tweak my budget in areas I hadn’t found as obvious.
The security question is answered by their lack of identifying information. No names, no social security numbers, no way to edit anything relating to the accounts. No one can open an account without your information, so Mint sidesteps it by not asking for it at all. It does ask for basic information, like age, credit score range and income range, so it can make better recommendations. Its Web 2.0-based design makes it easy to follow, and it updates with each log-in.
The one downfall I found is it’s not always able to capture all of your information. In my case, I have a store credit card that it could not follow because it’s not in their list. However, they do accept submissions on what else should be included, so just because it’s not included now doesn’t mean it won’t be in the future.
I liked their tool to make recommendations on how to save or make more money, by making recommendations. They are clear that this is an advertising tool, but it’s pretty honest in its comparisons of most things to what you’re paying or saving with the new service versus the old.
Mint is worth checking out, especially if you currently do all of your banking by pen and paper or don’t have a clear budgeting tool in place. Those who use Quicken or the dearly-departed Microsoft Money might find this unnecessary or even not powerful enough, but for most of us it’s a solid choice, and a free one at that.
