Investor Junkie
My Business and Financial Freedom Journey

Mint Review: Should I Use Mint.com?

Mint.com

Mint is a FREE online personal finance (web 2.0) service similar to Quicken.  Mint was recently acquired by Inuit for ah… mint.  I decided to look at Mint to see what the buzz is about.  For the past 6 months I’ve taken mint.com for a test spin with my personal finances.  With Mint you have local software to install and is a service you can access with any web browser.

I currently manage my finances by using Quicken. I’ve been an Intuit Quicken user since the MS DOS days.  For the youngsters reading this blog, that’s for over 18 years.  I can’t say I have my finances since then (it would be neat to see my savings in 1993 when I graduated college).    Unfortunately 7 years ago I lost all of my data from a bad backup.  From MS DOS, I’ve since moved up the evolutionary operating system food chain to Quicken for Windows.  I run it in a VMware Fusion instance on my Apple OS X computer.  For the non-geeks out there, I do this because Intuit’s Apple Macintosh version isn’t worth using.  Let me be clear about this, Quicken for OS X has always been the bastard child.  I won’t even consider it an option for managing my finances, for the many reasons mentioned by commentators on Amazon’s site.

Using Mint

Mint was a breeze to initially sign up and add accounts.  I chose 10+ accounts, a mixture of banking, credit cards, loans and investing.  All accounts seamlessly downloaded my online data.  You might be asking, “how does Mint make money from this free service?”  Mint makes their money by offering ways to help save, or make you money by recommending various financial services.  Mint seems to be more focused on catering to the masses.  It appears very strong on the budgeting and tracking expenses.  It’s investing area, while dedicated, seems somewhat simplistic.  Like most of Mint, it is much simpler than Quicken and lacks it’s many features.  With the acquisition of Mint, it’s obvious it’s the future of the Quicken product line.  Intuit’s current online version of Quicken was not much of a success and I assume it’s the reason why they purchased Mint.  In addition, Microsoft discontinued Money this year so there aren’t many other games in town.

Great Features in Mint

• Weekly summaries via Email
• Alerts via Email or SMS page.  Will alert on pending bills and ways to save money on transaction fees.
• Mobile access via the FREE iPod Touch/iPhone version.  It provides you with a great snapshot of your finances.
• Automatic download of account transactions

Issues with Mint

• Lack of advanced features (though they are catering more to lower end users).  Their investing section seems OK at best.
• Security.  I understand their security setup.  What concerns me is the centralization of so much data by itself. This can be very useful for a hacker.
• Backups.  With many web 2.0 services, you are relying on them to perform proper backups.  While in this case no critical data can be lost (account data is stored with the bank), but setup of categories, alerts are stored with Mint.
• Assignments to income/expense categories are not always correct, and sometimes-manual intervention is needed.

Is Mint Secure?

I think locally installed applications like Quicken are going the way of the Dodo bird.  I know, call me old fashion, but I like having all of my data locally within Quicken.  I do think a hybrid, of local and remote application via sites like Mint is the future of this industry.  Since I’m in the technology industry and deal with security all the time, I know the risks of leaving security to a third party.  I’m not saying Mint is insecure.  Of course for Mint that is their biggest adoption road block and addresses it quite a bit in their forums.  In some ways I have also outgrown Quicken.  Recently, I’ve been creating Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for managing parts of my portfolio.  Specifically I manage our precious metals, and security bucket (which is primarily fixed income).  Quicken, or any other application for that matter, don’t seem to have tools to help manage these areas of your finance.  I wind up transferring the total amount into a Quicken asset account.

Summary

Mint is great for creating and tracking your budget.  It’s great you can get alerts via Email to ensure timely bill payments.  It’s unfortunate that Mint’s investing area is very week for all of but the basic investors.  Mint unfortunately does not have many of the great features Morningstar has to help create good balanced portfolio.   While Morningstar’s service is great (I myself use the service), it charges a yearly subscription fee.  It might be possible for Mint to figure out a way to offer the same services for FREE.  For me, I’ll keep using Mint for it’s basic budgeting features.

Created: Monday, 21 December 2009 12:00 Last Updated: Saturday, 16 January 2010 09:14 Written by: Investor Junkie