Mint.com Review 2023
A Free Budgeting and Personal Finance App
Mint is a FREE online personal finance (web 2.0) service similar to Quicken. Over the past several years, I've taken the Mint app for a test spin with my personal finances. With Mint, you have no local software to install, and it's a service you can access with any browser or mobile device.
Our Mint review is covering all of its features, pros and cons, and some alternatives you can consider as well.
Cost - 10
Customer Service - 6
Ease of Use - 9
Tools & Resources - 8
Synchronization - 7
Accessibility - 8.5
8.5
Free personal finance app Mint can make budgeting and expense tracking paying easy. It can even track your credit score. However, when it comes to investing, there are many more sophisticated products, and users have complained about problems with the bank synchronization functions.
What Is the Mint App?
With more than 20 million users, Mint.com is a simple personal finance program that's web-based. It's free to sign up, and it takes only a few seconds to add new accounts. I picked ten personal accounts to test the service. I selected a mixture of banking, credit cards, loans, and investing in brokerage accounts. Upon initial setup, Mint.com seamlessly downloaded my financial data.
Every time you visit the site, your financial data gets updated automatically. Mint presents your financial information in a slick, easy-to-use web interface, with pretty graphs and all.
Although the service appears to be more about glitz than useful functionality, it's still very helpful for things like budgeting, creating goals, and aggregating all your financial accounts in one place. Mint's dashboard gives a quick summary of your personal finances at a glance.
Mint.com Features
| Price | Min: $0, Max: $0, Term: free |
| Budgeting | |
| Bill Payment | |
| Investment Tracking | |
| Access | Web Based, iOS, Android |
| Credit Score Monitoring | |
| Bill Management | |
| Retirement Planning | |
| Tax Reporting | |
| Reconcile Transactions | |
| Custom Categories | |
| Import QFX, QIF Files | |
| Two-Factor Authentication | |
| Online Synchronization |
Budgeting and Tracking Expenses
Mint's primary feature is all about budgeting and tracking expenses, and this is where the service shines. Budgeting is super easy to set up: After downloading and syncing your transactions, they get auto-categorized into predefined categories. You can create your own subcategories as well, and Mint highlights all of your spending across different categories and if you're over or under the spending limits you set.
This budgeting section provides a snappy overview of how you're doing in terms of not overspending on different categories. And it's useful if you frequently find yourself spending on entertainment, eating out, or other budget areas that might be easier to cut back on.
You also have the option to make changes to your transactions after they are downloaded. The auto-categorization is far from perfect, and you'll need to make adjustments from time to time. However, once Mint memorizes your transactions, it will automatically place them in the correct categories in the future.
And one feature I really like about Mint is its “Spending by category” tab which provides a more visual breakdown of where all your money is going. It also lets you view spending by each merchant which can help you identify potential areas of overspending.
Overall, Mint's budgeting tools are its main selling point. And if you like a visual method for tracking your spending, it's the perfect solution.
Creating and Managing Goals
Another prominent feature is the goal tracking and managing feature. New goals, such as paying off credit card debt or saving for a new home, are simple to set up and are easily reflected in your monthly budgeting.
Mint also lets you set a desired deadline for your goals and then suggests how much you should save each month to reach your goal in time.
You can create as many goals as you want and create custom ones if you don't find a pre-set goal.
Monitoring Credit Scores
Mint recently rolled out a free credit score tracking option, which makes keeping track of your entire financial picture as easy as logging in. Just click on the “Show Details” button to view your credit score, payment history, age of credit accounts, and lots more. You also have the chance to upgrade to a premium version.
Mint.com's service seems to be more focused on catering to the masses. It's very strong with budgeting and tracking expenses, but its investing area is simplistic at best. Like most of Mint, it's much simpler than Intuit's Quicken and lacks many features (see our Quicken Review).
With the acquisition of Mint by Intuit, it's obvious this is the future of the Quicken product line. Besides, Microsoft discontinued Money in January 2011, so there aren't many viable alternatives around.
Investing & Crypto Tracking
Another useful Mint feature is its crypto and investing tracker. Users can now connect their investment accounts to Mint to easily monitor their portfolio. The app supports most online brokers, so you shouldn't have issues connecting your accounts.
Additionally, Mint now partners with Coinbase, a leading crypto exchange, to let you track your Bitcoin holdings. If you diversify with BTC, this feature is useful, although having support for altcoins like Ethereum, Cardano, and other popular coins would be nice.
Net Worth Tracker
Since Mint consolidates all of your banking and online brokerage accounts, it also has a nifty net worth tracking tool you can use.
It's a fairly simple tracker, but you can manually add assets like artwork, cars, your home, precious metals, or any other asset you have. You can also manually enter debts like loans and credit card debt.
Options like Empower are better if you want more investing insights alongside a free net worth tracker. But it's nice that Mint also has a basic tracker so you can visualize the impact your budgeting and saving is having on your net worth.
Subscription Management
One other Mint feature you can use to cut down on spending is its subscription management feature. The app highlights recurring charges and even notifies you if certain subscriptions increase in price. This can help you catch increases in bills like your internet or phone plan or various streaming services that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Apps like Truebill also have this feature, but we like Mint because almost all of its features are completely free. You can read our Mint vs. Truebill article for a comparison of these subscription management services, but we prefer Mint.
Mint.com Apps
Mint offers complete access to your financial data through both its website and your favorite mobile device. The service has mobile apps for Apple's iPhone and iPad and Google's Android.
This makes it easy to access your finances on the go. For added security, Mint recently rolled out the Touch ID sensor for iOS that reads your fingerprint and automatically unlocks your phone, allowing you quick access to the Mint.com app.
Get Alerts From Mint
Mint keeps an eye on your money, so you don't have to. It's easy to sign up for alerts to be sent via email or directly to your smartphone. Get alerts for:
- Late fees
- Over budget in a category
- Bill reminders
- Rate changes
- Large purchases
How Does Mint Make Money?
The service is free to use, and there are no hidden fees; this is otherwise known as the freemium model. You might be asking, “How does Mint make money from this free service?” Well, it makes money by offering “ways to save” or to make you money by recommending various financial services from which Mint gets a referral fee. Mint also recently introduced ad banners in various parts of the website to monetize users. Additionally, you can now sign up for premium access to your credit report.
Mint also sells the aggregate (not your individual) financial data to various providers. This includes information about consumer spending, the average credit card balance, how many retirement accounts a user may have, etc. It must be stressed, however, that the data is collected anonymously and does not refer back to individual usage.
Mint Premium vs. Free Plan
Users can upgrade to Mint Premium for $4.99 per month. This plan removes ads from the platform and provides several other perks like:
- Bill negotiation and cancelation help with Mint's partner, BillShark
- Spending projections and breakdowns with advanced data visualization
- Download Mint data in a CSV file from the mobile app
- Compare your spending habits to other Mint users
Removing ads is honestly the main advantage of Mint Premium unless you really make use of its spending projections to avoid overspending before it's too late. But at $4.99 per month, that's almost $60 per year, which isn't cheap by any means.
Is Mint Secure?
I think locally installed applications like Quicken are going the way of the dodo bird. I do think a hybrid of local and remote (cloud-based) applications like Mint.com 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. Mind you. I'm not saying Mint is insecure. In many cases, an individual's desktop computer is much less secure. Of course, the perception of security is Mint's biggest adoption roadblock.
The recently added two-factor authentication is a nice but needed touch for any financial service. Mint won't allow you access to your account until you validate your computer with something you have (this is the second factor, with your password being your first). You can do this via one of two methods, either via the email address when you signed up or by an SMS text message to your cellphone. Mint will send you a random code, which you then must enter on the website.
Mint Alternatives
Mint is an excellent budgeting and financial planning app that's popular because it's free and easy to use. However, it has fairly simple investing features. Additionally, since Mint does a bit of everything, it's not always the best solution if you're looking to solve one specific problem, like creating an in-depth budget.
| Highlights |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rating | 9.5/10 | 8.5/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Budgeting | |||
| Investment Monitoring | |||
| Retirement Planning | |||
| Bill Payment | |||
| Manual Entries | |||
| Bill Management | |||
If you're just interested in budgeting help and want the most customization options, YNAB is our favorite Mint alternative. It costs $14.99 per month, but it's a comprehensive budgeting solution that can help get you back on track with your spending. You can read our YNAB vs. Mint article for a complete breakdown of these two budgeting apps.
As for Empower, it provides more retirement planning tools and has a useful and free investing fee analyzer you can use. And if you have $100,000 or more to invest, you can use its Wealth Management offering and work with human advisors to build a custom portfolio.
Finally, Experian can help you improve your credit score, while Mint is just useful for monitoring your credit score.
Get more Mint Alternatives we recommend.
How Does It Compare to Quicken?
While I use Quicken as our primary method to manage our entire finances, I have also somewhat outgrown Quicken as well. Recently, I've been creating Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for managing parts of my portfolio. Specifically, I manage our precious metals and our security bucket (which is primarily fixed income) outside Quicken.
Quicken, or any other application for that matter, does not seem to have tools to help manage these areas of your finances. To manage these assets, I wind up transferring the total amount into a Quicken account. With this said, Quicken still has many features and functionalities that in Mint are either very simplistic or non-existent.
For a more in-depth comparison of the two, read our Quicken vs. Mint article.
Mint Pros & Cons
pros
cons
Summary
Mint is excellent for creating and tracking your budget, goals, and credit score. The alerts sent via email are a useful and welcomed feature. Unfortunately, Mint's investing area is very weak for all but the basic investors. In fact, the investing area is so weak that they don't list it on their website as one of the primary reasons to use Mint.com.
Mint, unfortunately, does not have investment and asset allocation tools like Empower (check out our Empower review). If you have over $100,000 in investments, Empower is a much better fit.
Besides, Empower doesn't have the same synchronization issues as Mint.com. When Intuit acquired Mint.com, it replaced Yodlee (which does the financial synchronization) with its internal system.
Many users of Mint.com stated synchronization issues started happening only after this switchover occurred. Empower uses Yodlee to link up accounts (which is what Mint used before the Intuit buyout). My experience with Empowers synchronization has been more reliable.
Until May 2018, Mint offered a Bill Pay feature that was very handy. However, the company decided to nix this service, for reasons not entirely clear to us. This puts a strike against Mint if you're looking to manage your finances from one account completely. Here are some bill management alternatives.
We recommend using Mint for its basic budgeting, goal, and credit score features. Since Mint.com does not cost anything to use, you might as well sign up and give it a spin. For better investment tools and more reliable synchronization, I recommend using Empower instead.
I’ve used Mint for over 10 years and despite being a bit buggy, it has always been very useful – until now. The “new and improved” design for 2022 is an absolute train wreck. Nothing works any more. Search criteria don’t get included in reports. Transactions don’t show source accounts. The new layout terrible. It’s a real shame because this has always been so useful to me. It has left me scrambling to find another option to aggregate my accounts.
I just ditched Mint because its super buggy. I had bills go missing and some never updated. I’ve been pushing Mint support fir two months for a resolution, they never could fix it. Even missed a bill because they figure out scheduling. If this is the state of Intuit software development, they are doomed.
Why is Mint customer service so bad? I have been using Mint for a few years now with few issues. This past December it stopped connecting to my main bank account and Mint has yet to fix the problem. I have had many chat sessions, been told the problem was being escalated to the engineering team, been told they were working it with my bank (which was not true according to actual IT people that I was able to talk to at my bank) and still have not fixed the issue. Right now I can’t recommend Mint to anyone.
Yes, agree that Mint’s time in the limelight is now over. I have relied heavily on it for over 4 years, but in the past year its responsiveness has gone down and its glitchiness has gone WAY up. It is impossible to interact with a real person, it does not synch without several reboots of accounts, it will not recognize my 401K account servicer even after spending countless hours with the Mint “chat” team, and I could go on. I have no problem paying for a budget/fiance service and I am looking for an alternative. Monarch may be it.
2020, the net worth overview with a summary of all your accounts have been missing for MONTHS. Without that information, the application is useless. I was fine with needing to update sign-in info as it was a reflection of the security detail they have been implementing. BUT now the interface is missing the critical data, “What do I have?” Account balances are missing. You can pull transactions by each account. But it’s difficult to navigate to your overall net worth. As someone who has been in the financial services industry for over a decade, as the interface stands right now, I can say that without having a view of account aggregation available on the home page, this app will not be as successful as it has been in the past. I hope things change for the better considering you have had longstanding stellar reviews.
I’m so over Mint. All the things it purports to do sound great, except everything doesn’t quite work right. I get alerts for bills that were paid off a year ago and no longer appear anywhere. I get constant failures syncing my accounts. And so on and so on. I’ve sent multiple notices and have been waiting over a year for some of these failings to get corrected, but nothing has changed.
And the ads… the ads! They’ve gotten so obtrusive that the site is barely useful.
Save yourself some headaches and look elsewhere.
I am so disappointed in the MINT app. I had high hopes, but continuously have connection issues and accounts don’t update. The worst part is after trying to remedy this via their chat help multiple times I am always fed the line of “we apologize for the inconvenience and will escaate this and you will receive an email” which never arrives. Of course there is no phone number and their chat help is clearly in a call center where people don’t comprehend well and you are simply fed lines from a script. Customer services gets an F in my book. Switching to Personal Capital.
After years of using Quicken and frustrated at the complicated sign-in procedure, I looked for another program. After the first failure, I tried Mint. It is even more difficult to sign in than quicken not to mention the variety of needed passwords. Since Intuit is the creator/owner of both, it is little wonder that they are related. It was a total waste of one day with nothing to show for it. I would recommend this program for those that have nothing to do.
The customer service is a real issue. Look, it’s okay for a service to be updating and working on a persistent issue. The investment section has long been problematic. I understand that it’s complex and that’s okay. It has never shown the correct cost basis for me. So when I go to enter the “Price Paid” manually, there were some major software glitches such that adding up positive numbers gave me a negative output. I tried to go through their customer service chat and it became clear very quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to get anything more than stock answers out of a chat bot. My distinct impression then is that Intuit is no longer interested in updating the software. They can just let it sit there earning a dwindling amount of ad revenue and providing no further updates. I have to strongly recommend against signing up. There must be something better out there.
The Author states: “With the acquisition of Mint by Intuit, it’s obvious this is the future of the Quicken product line. In addition, Microsoft discontinued Money January 2011, so there aren’t many viable alternatives around.”
On the contrary, I would suggest that the acquisition of Mint was a move to protect the Quicken product line. Since Intuit’s acquisition, some of the fundamental issues with MIST (account access, synchronization, and reconciliation) have only gotten worse, bill pay has been eliminated, and customer service/support has been relegated to stock answers from a “knowledge base.” Chat is still available as second-level support (once you’ve drilled down through the stock responses); however, if your issue is even remotely complex, “escalation” is a black hole. There is no email account for Mint support or even a public forum (through which a more complete discussion of one’s issues might be explored).
I have been a loyal Mint user for three years. It showed enormous promise prior to Intuit’s acquisition. The degradation of functionality and the evaporation of support since then are forcing me to explore alternatives. [BTW, Contrary to the authors assertion, there are viable alternatives, although for my money, Quicken (still vibrant and supported by an active online community) will not be among them because of Intuit’s emasculation of one my favorite finds.]
Finally, keep in mind that Mint is “free.” Its business model is based not on user fees, but ad revenue and aggregate user data (or personally identifiable information if you opt in) shared with financial product and service companies.
But there comes a time when “free” still costs too much. If its customer base begins to erode (due to continuing technical issues and lackluster support), Mint will be drawn into a “death spiral” — and that will only inure to the benefit of products (like Quicken) whose fortunes are tied to annual license fees.
I understand and appreciate the dynamics of the marketplace, but as a longtime Mint supporter, I find this all a bit sad.
I was a Quicken user right up until they time-bombed their software to not sync unless you pay a yearly subscription. I’m sure they are very happy to hear folks like the author of this article espousing that such software is, “going the way of the do-do”. Also interesting that Mint is having issues now that Intuit grabbed it up. I only want a program that syncs my multiple accounts so that I can in one place verify receipts match what was charged to my account and to categorize at-a-glance where I’m spending my money. Quicken has never been good at giving accurate numbers of my ESPP or other investments anyway, so why would I want to pay them?
I used to love Mint for being, of course, free and because it was simple to use. In the last couple of years, it’s become basically useless. My bank account balance NEVER updates no matter how many times I refresh… nor do my transactions. The two main reasons I would ever use the app are broken. Spend a couple bucks and get an actual budget program; you won’t regret it.
Mint is the worst program for trying to do simple things. You can’t download transaction between certain dates unless you create a very complicated link where you have to embed the start and end dates of the transactions you need. Otherwise you have to down load every transaction you have in Excel and sort through that mess. Even App programming 101 allows for such a simple process to take place. Not Mint. Also they fail miserably when you want to try to print an income statement for your household showing income versus expenses. They only appear to provide these graphs that hardly tell the story. Anyone know some really good budgeting programs? Free does not mean free from hassle and ease of extraction of information.
do not even bother with this program. Tried 3 times on chat and nothing. Apparently the questions were too complicated. Save your time, and always check reviews before even looking at a program. This is a joke.
What happens if Mint sends your financials to the wrong email?!!I updated my email on my account and was receiving communication from Mint with the updated email address, until Mint sent my monthly financials to my old email, which a ex coworker was able to see. They stated it was because I didn’t update my user name to match my email. My email was updated, I was receiving other communication from Mint to the correct email address, but not my Monthly statement?
Am i correct to conclude that when one writes a check to pay a bill, it will be necessary to manually edit the Mint record of the transaction to correctly identify the payee and the expense category on wants it in? Does Mint have a feature that enables one to write checks from one’s computer, print them, and have them automatically entered into Mint’s record with the proper payee and expense category — as Quicken enabled one to do (and provided checks to use for this purpose)?
Mint is the absolute WORST. Zero customer service. Even the chat does not work. “Mark M” from customer service hung up on me (or the site crashed) even as i was trying to explain why i want to close my account.Now the site is not working again and although mint said I changed my password (I did) it won’t take the new password!!!
New Yodlee- Recently Yodlee moneycenter moved to a new platform from the old yodlee lads, during this process my moneycenter password got locked out. I tried the change password option but it sends me to blank page. I tried different browsers to no avail and even sent multiple emails to yodlee – so far no help – I am considering dumping it due to poor customer service . Does anyone have any ideas what to do
New Yodlee- Recently Yodlee moneycenter moved to a new platform from the old yodlee lads, during this process my moneycenter password got locked out. I tried the eoption but it sends me to blank page. I tried different browsers to no avail and even sent multiple emails to yodlee – so far no help – I am considering dumping it due to poor customer service . Does anyone have any ideas what to do
Mint seems to have account sync as their main selling point, but does it allow manual entries into custom-created accounts? I know I’m anal, but I have a cash-on-hand account that I like to track, to which downloading obviously doesn’t apply. Also like to track accrual accounts for budget purposes.
I was sorely disappointed in Personal Capital’s lack of functionality, and just wanted to know if Mint is just as inflexible.
In this recent review of Mint – this author talks about adding other accounts that will not directly link. https://clark.com/personal-finance-credit/mint-budgeting-review/
If I read the privacy statement correctly, Mint will report a customer’s activity to credit reporting agencies? I am also wary, having received a promotion from another financial institution that knew my credit card acct. balances. Though I don’t know for sure if this information was provided from Mint, this had not happened before using Mint.
I believe this is when using their free (or paid) credit reporting tool.
Thank you for your reply and for your excellent reviews and articles.
The following is from their general privacy policy. I can’t tell if this is in regard to dealing with Intuit/Mint – such as late payments to their company – or if they will report activity with customers’ other accounts/loans monitored or used with Mint.
from https://security.intuit.com/index.php/privacy
“Reporting to Credit Bureaus. We may share your information with credit bureaus, consumer reporting agencies, and card associations. Late payments, missed payments, or other defaults on your account may be reflected in your credit report and consumer report. We may also share your information with other companies, lawyers, credit bureaus, agents, government agencies, and card associations in connection with issues related to fraud, credit, or debt collection.”
I started using mint.com in 2011 and loved it. Previously whenever I had a problem, it was resolved through email support. It might take a day or two but it got fixed. As of today, that’s a thing of the past and mint.com is no longer worth using due to non-existent tech support.
As of today their support is useless – emails go into a dark hole and are never answered while their chat support is a joke and can’t really resolve issues.
I’ve had one of my main accounts unable to update for over a month now and contacted mint.com multiple times through both email and chat. I now also have to manually refresh every active account on the site when I log in – that used to be automatic.
My understanding is whoever build this website sold it recently and whoever took itover is killing it.
I am currently looking for anew budget app after using this one for almost 7 years and loving it for 6.5 of that time. Unfortunately it appears to be dying a slow death.
If you don’t use it, don’t start. If you do, you need to backup your info and migrate to another application as soon as possible.
How on earth did Mint get above a 1 out of 10 for synchronization? I have been using Mint since its first year, and never once have I signed in without having to “fix” at least one of my accounts. Usually I have to “fix” a number of them. Often this means going to the bank website and changing my password. It can take about 30 minutes to an hour each time I want to use Mint. I’ve tried everything to avoid this, including trying to find banks that play more nicely with it, just to cut down on time.
Is this problem the same for everyone? Are there people who use mint that don’t have these terrible synchronization issues? If so, what are your secrets? What banks do you use? It would be great to create a list of banks that don’t cause synchronization issues.
If everyone has these problems, then why aren’t more people talking about it? And how on earth did it get a 7/10 for synchronization in this review?
I appreciate any help!
I disagree that Personal Capital is better than Mint. Mint is the only “free” cloud based budget manager that allows you to change the date of a transaction, which to me if you can’t, it’s a show stopper. When the 1st falls on weekend or holiday our direct deposit incomes and mortgage payment posts early. If you can’t change that it messes up the ending and following month’s budget in expenses and income, making the program useless.
Quicken is my go-to finance app but I use Mint to verify it primarily. Prior to Quicken 2017, it had as many account sync issues as Mint has, but I have not had any issues since upgrading to 2017. I’m currently having a Mint sync issue / error with Fidelity Investments / Fidelity Visa Rewards.
I’m convinced Q remains the correct platform for my needs. I have no problems with how it handles securities; I use that functionality as a dashboard/aggregator and an indicator of tax positions. I could do that through TIAA or Fidelity, if I wanted. But it’s nice to have it all in one spot. And, I still want to run my checks (the half-dozen or so I still write every month) through a financial program. I haven’t found anything out there that has what Quicken still offers.
True, I’m fed up with the new owners’ insistence on trying to sell upgrades on a continuous basis. But, that’s just a nuisance.
I do not find Mint useful and have tried mightily to close my account. I have called customer service 3 times without any success. The Mint emails say that to unsubscribe I have to login to my account but I have no user ID or password so I cannot do so. So the emails just go to my scam/junk folder where I ignore and automatically delete them. This is very frustrating and my conclusion is that Mint customer service is TERRIBLE!
I recently received a suspicious looking email notifying me that a scheduled bill payment had been canceled. I logged into Mint and sure enough, the current status of that bill was canceled. However, on the scheduled payment date the payment was made (this after making a payment directly on the credit card issuer’s site).
I’ve been unable to find any reports of this. Surely I’m not the only user to whom this has happened!
I have been using the bill pay feature since they rolled it out and it doesn’t seem like they have fixed any of the initial bugs. I have so much trouble getting the accounts to stay connected and up-to-date. If it has trouble connecting to one it just keeps trying over and over again. This was an issue with my water bill account because after 3 unsuccessful log in attempts it locks your account and you have to go through a long process of proving your identity and changing your password. I had to do this 8 times before I realized it was Mint that was causing it. For my car insurance it pulls my full policy amount, not my monthly payment amount, so it miscalculates my current bill. My bank account and credit card amounts are never current. They are usually 24 hours behind which makes it look like I have more money in my account than I actually do. I scheduled my electric bill to be paid last month but then got a letter saying my bill wasn’t paid. Last week I scheduled my car insurance to be paid today and I just got an email from Mint reminding me to schedule my car insurance payment. I’ve stuck with it because I love the concept and think it would be greatly beneficial to have one platform to organize and pay your bills, but I’m getting pretty fed up.
Two of my credit cards are not currently supported by Mint. This makes it essentially useless. Support is non-existent.
Beware of customer support and of data deletion! Due to a glitch in the software my accounts were duplicated. When removed I lost almost a years worth of data! I chatted with customer service and they told me there was nothing they could do and that they don’t back up any data!? They were rude and midway through the discussion disconnected from me and deleted the chat history. I had copied the discussion before they deleted it and re-initiated contact with them and received more aggressive and aggravating responses. Nothing was resolved and I am left with a loss of all I recorded with them right as I am trying to complete my tax returns!
Is this app really safe when you need to enter your banking info into it?
Yes.
This software has been extremely buggy since day one. It almost never connects to the accounts that I try to add to it. It will stall out and have an error of some kind and only when I try repeatedly over a period of a week will it finally connect. Just today for the third time I have been unable to log in. No error message nothing. I’m looking for new software to help me manage my money.
Hi Tim,
We have reviewed all of the other personal finance apps, so check them out.
I like Mint for the most part. However I have a couple of accounts that I can’t add because they won’t do the synchronization thing. If they would just let me add the necessary information then track the transactions that I enter. I would love to find something better where I can manually set up accounts and enter transactions along with online syn. for the accounts that will. Then track all of the accounts in one central location. Is this to much to ask.
Intuit has faulty login credentials systems and makes for frustrating experiences, which in fact outweigh the benefits it provides. After all the frustration, I’m going to delete my account over there, and may be not use TurboTax or Mint ever again.
Mint is good to look at all your accounts in one place, but that’s it. I don’t see any other major advantages, except for free credit score, which is available now from various credit cards.
Mint was always a nice-to-have (i.e. not needed) software for me, and after all the login hassles, it’s become a must-not-have! 🙂
They are “upgrading” mint and the new version requires you to enter your account over again. I have been trying to do this for two weeks and it doesn’t work. The old mint goes away March 26 and live customer service at mint doesn’t exist. I have to email them and they keep telling me to delete and add my account so they can get a time stamp. I feel like I am talking to some front line person with no knowledge whatsoever. First, is anyone else having this issue and second what simple app is there in its place? I only use it for my banking and bills. Nothing fancy
I suggest looking at YNAB which we have reviewed as well.
Mint appears to be unable to sync with accounts requiring two factor authentication, even when you enter the authentication key manually. Some of my accounts haven’t synced with Mint for over a year. Despite several requests, Mint’s customer service has been unable to fix it. Has anyone else experienced this problem, or found a solution? Does Personal Capital also have this problem?
I personally have many accounts with two-factor and use them within Personal Capital without issue.
I have been trying for three days to get this working on my MacBook Pro. Unable to update my password. have switched to MoneyWiz 2.
Based on 25 years in the computer industry, I have to say that the Mint tech support is the absolute worst I have ever encountered. While they give you a case # when you log a problem with them, no one documents the case or even looks at the case notes before responding. Plus, you don’t get to work with a single individual – every email is answered by someone else. Which means you get stuck in my version of tech support hell – the same questions being asked over and over again, no one is aware of what has been tested/tried/changed previously on their end. I spent 2 months and 15 very long winded emails explaining over and over again the small issue I had that they then turned into a large issue. I gave up when my very last email was once again answered with “oh, what seems to be the problem?” It is enough to make you go postal.
Mint is Great! And now it has added Bill Pay.
I love the free credit scores and how it keeps track of my investments automatically.
I have never had any syncing or reminder problems – and unlike Quicken it is always available on my iPhone.
I was only using Quicken to keep track of deductible expenses for my taxes – but now I’ve learned that I can get the same info from the Trends tab in Mint.
No more expensive Quicken updates for me – Mint rules!
this app sucks but website has a million more features, website is great
No graphs, trends really available like w website, and you can’t view desktop version of site from phone
Why did u give this a good rating?
I started using Mint maybe 6 months ago and it’s terrible. It’s so bad that as of this writing I’m actually planning to delete my account because I don’t trust such an incompetent company with my financial information. Everything started out well – all my accounts were displaying and refreshing correctly, including my two linked Colorado PERA accounts – 401(k) and pension. Then my Colorado PERA accounts stopped updating. I noticed there was already a thread on their forum about this. They would update that thread all the time saying ‘we’ve fixed this, please try your account again.’ And each time of course it was still not fixed. Last time I checked, that thread was marked as Resolved and closed for comments. But my problems with my 2 Colorado PERA accounts still persist. Only one of them is visible on my Mint account now – the 401(k) account – and the pension account now does not display at all. I’ve contacted their support twice about this they have not fixed or even addressed the problem. The last time I contacted them the rep said something like ‘I just looked at your account and I see it’s updating successfully. So everything should be good.’ Did she even read my original comment?? I’ve wasted so much time on this, I’m just about ready to give up.
Agreed with all the comments below. I started using Mint in summer 2016. It’s intended simplicity is lovely. However the sync-related issues are horrendous and constant. Customer service is friendly but really – every week I’ve got an issue that the system itself created. The lightbulb went off this week when I spent 8 hours on a beautiful Saturday trying to un-duplicate all my accounts, which Mint itself had duplicated independently (wreaking havoc on all past records as well as current). I switched to Mint because I wanted something simpler and lighter than Quicken. It’s not simpler if your accounting work changes from tricky money management to tricky computer mess management.
My biggest complaint about Mint’s budgeting tool is that it has 2 requirements for your month to show as green / on budget:
1) don’t spend more than your total budget for the month (great! that’s how a budget should work!), and
2) you have to make sure you don’t earn less income than you budgeted as well —- and there is my biggest issue with Mint.
I need this to be a spending budget only and not tied to my income. I don’t make the same amount of money each month so that income budget is really a “goal” for me. Some months I make a lot and that needs to last me several months. other months i make literally zero dollars. Regardless of how much I earn a specific month, I still have a spending budget and for me, that spending budget is not directly tied to my income for that particular month.
If I do good and make sure to spend less than my total budget for the month, it irritates me to no end for that month to scream red at me. I work very hard to make sure i stay on budget and Mint makes me feel like I lost the battle everytime i forget to update the income number in time. If i don’t change the income number to match what i actually made for the month before the month ends then that month is forever RED unless i fake it and force more income into that month by changing transaction dates.
If Mint chooses to keep it this way, they could at least make the month’s budget editable after the month is over so people like me aren’t stuck with our income being a deciding factor in our Spending Budget when that just doesnt make sense for us —- especially when you consider that you can’t edit the income goal at all in the mobile app. I would bet there are a lot of people like me using Mint that have this same complaint.
I have used Quicken for a number of years . one feature that I use a lot is whether to use a category or not on my budget. . It comes in handy for a number of reasons . Does mint have this feature?
Mint is officially annoying. I received a message about “unusual spending” when the amount reported has been exactly the same for over two years. How/why this happens is odd.
Larry Ludwig–I used Mint for a few years then stopped because of hassles having to update accounts and re-create links too often. Was just thinking of trying again until I learned that it’s been taken over by Intuit and that Intuit explicitly states that it is able to handle money online, and gives details by US state. One of the key selling features of Mint when I first started using it was that there was no possibility that Mint could transfer funds from any of my accounts. From a security standpoint would you be concerned that Intuit can’t offer this protection?
Disappointed with Mint. How does a budgeting app only support monthly budgets? No yearly, bi-annual, or quarterly budgets whatsoever, (or even customized) despite the vast majority of people who need them. Which is incredibly frustrating being a student, since I only buy my books once a year. I can’t simply divide this up with a monthly budget. And books is barely scraping the surface. What about my tuition payments that only get paid twice a year? Or car insurance? The list goes on and on, yet Mint still has done nothing to meet the demands of its users.
I just tried mint again for the first time since 2008. It’s still fundamentally broken in the same way; banks record transactions as long strings, yet mint does a simple match of up to the first 20 alphanumeric characters, which means that ALL my automatic withdraws end up being renamed the same thing.
The crazy part is that the fix for this is silly simple–allow both longer matches AND have an option for a regex expression to be entered and for both to be associated with one or more accounts. This would not take a great deal of coding.
The failure to fix this after eight years (8 YEARS) tells me that Mint.com isn’t a serious company.. My experience as a professional software developer is that companies which are lazy with details like this are lazy with security and plenty of other things. (The truly aggravating part is that Intuit has known about this issue with ALL of their software and apparently has yet to fix it. I actually know of technology that could learn precise auto-categorization with minimal intervention of the user.)
DO NOT use Mint. That’s my advice after 4 years of consistent use.
I don’t know what to replace it with yet because I have a huge system built around it’s agregation, but it’s obvious that I should not have done that at this point. Mint nearly has me in tears every time I use it now.
For the last two years, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time reclassifying expenses. Things like my mortgage, a loan that has had no changes, has just suddenly started tracking as something else probably 10 times in the last two years. And that is just one account. This happens all the time with all kinds of accounts.
I have a savings account for auto maintenance and Mint thinks it’s a loan. I worked with Mint support to fix this for months and eventually they just had me remove it from tracking because they couldn’t fix the problem. Meanwhile, my student loan payment to Navient tracks as savings. Also unfixable.
Additionally, I have to reset the connection at minimum of 2 institutions every time I log in. At least 50% of the time, the reset fails. Somehow it updates later when I’m not logged in, but if you’re looking at expenses on the 20th, you don’t exactly want to look at them as of the 9th or wait an unknown amount of time for it to update itself, maybe.
There was a time that this software was great, and that’s why I began relying on it. Now it’s a major nuisance, full of advertising, dropped connections, incorrect information, and glitches that are impossible to anticipate or avoid. Mint is supposed to provide clarity and certainty when it comes to managing your money. Now that Intuit has allowed it to become a glitch-riddled joke of a platform, all of that clarity and certainty is gone. It does not and cannot provide the primary benefit that was it was created to provide.
The exact same thing happened to me. I’m also looking for an alternative now, after six years of using the software. I’m deeply frustrated and disappointed.
It has so many bugs that it is insane. They will fix them and than 2-3 months later they are right back… duplicate accounts, wrong categories and so on. I used the free service for long time but I’m getting tired of it. Maybe the paid version is better but I’m not about to try.
With the last few days left to file taxes you would think Mint.com (Intuit) would have tech support available around the clock. I’m locked out of my account and can’t get help, thanks Mint.
I use Mint all the time and can certainly recommend it for people looking for a place to consolidate and aggregate all their finances in one place. A Single pane of window if you will to see all your finances.
I am getting old and on the rate occasion forget to pay my CC bill and the reminders are useful if you look at them (I sometimes get lazy, I really try not to) but Mint reminds me what bills are coming up.
It is also a great overview, if you trying to do a quick search of how many times you have purchased something. For instance my daughter does Horse Riding lessons, I can quickly pull up and search for all the payments I have made at the touch of a finger. The other thing I found useful is to see how much I spend on groceries from month to month. Sometimes I think we spend too much, but going back shows me that, that was not the case it just seems like that. Having the data available to compare is invaluable.
I love Mint and can highly recommend it as a quick overview of all your accounts, Savings, Credit Card, Mortgages in a single pane. Great quick search if you looking for something.
They have also recently implement a 2-step authentication system which should give people more confidence. Just ensure you email such as gmail is using 2-step as well to provide additional security.
Love the product and would highly recommend it. I have been using it for well over a year now.
I did look at YNAB but wasn’t for me, too cumbersome. I love Mint because it goes out and queries all your accounts automatically. Sometimes i have to update my accounts, but this isn’t a huge issue. Having to input data in YNAB made no sense and as the author of this article mentioned a cloud based solution is the way the industry is going. Also consider all banks are online and accessed over the internet.
Having all your accounts in one place is scary, but I believe the advantages outweigh the concerns.
What I recommend is try it with a low risk account/bank and try it and see if it works for you, once you comfortable, add your accounts slowly and you will immediately see the benefits. The sooner you add them, the sooner it will add the history and allow you to search thru your data, compare your monthly spending.
Regards,
Maybe I’m the only one, but Mint (both the website and the app) is by far the slowest software I use. At times, its almost comically slow. For example, it takes several minutes in order to change the category of a particular transaction (i.e., the selection is constantly loading and freezes regularly).
I use Mint b/c of its convenience of keeping most of my accounts in one location, but I certainly do not use it because of its speed.
What browser do you use, have you tried different browsers or even a different platform like a iPad or Mac or Windows if you use the first two.
I used it all the time and it is not slow at all for me
Does mint.com charge a fee to use the bank debit card from the bank linked to mint? Does mint have a register to add charges from my bank card? Does mint charge twice when I personally add a transaction?
Thank you for your post, I enjoyed reading it.
Sherrie
Hi Sherrie,
No Mint charges nothing for their service.
how much does it cost to use mint.com?
Thanks,
blanca
Mint is free to use.
Thank you so much for this review. I have used quicken in the past and liked it, but never kept up with it mainly due to low income and a lack of any assets. But times have changed and in the market for software. I had plans to by the license for quicken when I ran into this app for iOS. I was impressed by the ease in which I connected all my accounts, even faster than using quicken 2013 all from one mobile app. I had downloaded it just to test it out and by the time I arrived home from grocery shopping (yes adding my transactions as I shopped) I had added almost every account I had.
Well like you I wondered about what gave. How do they make their money and thought the recommendations had something to do with it, but you mentioned the spending trends analysis which to be honest isn’t a bad trade off. The only thing that does concern me is security but that is the direction every thing seems to be going these days. I also found reading all the comments very helpful, they were at times even more informative than the review so thanks to everyone who put in their two cents.
I’m going to continue to use the app for the time being but I like features whether or not I used them doesn’t matter I like knowing they are there. Plus being able to customize my own categories is a must. But for anyone who wants to keep track of their spending and doesn’t mind that someone else is also, by all means it offers more than what you give for this free service.
how do I get through to there customer support. They do nothing about my problems except send email with no answers. I can’t login seem like it would be an easy fix. Crickets!!
Intuit bought a whole bunch of crapware and couldn’t put them together. But they didn’t hesitate to throw them out for a trial spin. Plenty of bugs on their website too. I quickly deleted all my account info once I realize the this mint is no that mint.
Please excuse me if this is too obvious of a question, but I would greatly appreciate your reply. First off, thanks for the excellent review of Mint.com. My wife and I are seriously thinking of using it as a budgeting tool to track our spending.
Here’s my question: we share the use of a single desktop mac, but we each have an iPhone 6. Can we set up Mint so that we can both enter data (separately and at different times) and have that data then reflected in our current account status? Obviously I am referring to accounts that are in both of our names.
Thank you in advance for any information / assistance you can provide. It will be much appreciated!
Yes that is possible.
The account sync problem accurately noted by Mr. Ludwig persist. Each day is a total crapshoot as to which of my accounts will or will not be linkable. I have been vetting two other systems at the same time, and neither of them have had linking problems — so it is not an issue with the banks.
I report the problem each time, and get perfunctory emails which are not very helpful. Today, in a support chat, the rep did at least acknowledge that this is a known problem, experience by many users, and that they are working on it.
Of what use is a system for tracking your finances if it will not reliably update with your banks and other financial institutions? I am willing to give Mint the benefit of the doubt, and wait a bit more for them to generate a fix. But my patience is running out.
Mint actually discontinued support for QuickView earlier this month. It’s gone from the app store, and those who had the app before can no longer access Mint’s servers. A huge bummer, since many of us used that app regularly.
Agreed as I was in the process of updating our ebook on Mint and adding this app to it. Fortunately we didn’t go to press yet and able to remove it.
I’ve had the Sync issues with Mint, so I looked elsewhere for a more reliable program.
Between the two, I personally prefer Personal Capital. It’s less clunky & provides more information for the same price, Free!
Does not perform!
I like that mint is able to compile all of my account info into one location, however, many of the features that mint.com promises DO NOT WORK!
For example, I set up low balance alerts on my wife’s checking account. Two times now, I have been hit with overdraft fees because mint’s low balance alert DOES NOT WORK! I emailed with mint.com customer service – their only answer thus far is that maybe if I logged into mint more frequently, the alert would work! So, in order to get the alert, I have to log in so frequently to check my balance, that I don’t need the alert!
Thanks mint! But if you can’t handle something as simple as this, then you are of no use to me.
I don’t understand the rave reviews on this, it’s absolutely worthless. As a previous reviewer says, it dosn’t work with Chase bank, so your account balance is never accurate. It “loses” creditors frequently, so you can no longer see that account, and attempting to “fix” it does not compute. The bill pay feature is absolutely useless. You click “pay,” the spinner spins for five minutes, then error. Try again, does not compute. I’ve lost hours of my life setting this service up and attempting to use it. It’s entirely worthless, there’s not a good thing about it.
I tried Mint because I have a friend that uses the site and loves it. I had to finally delete my account because the mint.com site kept requiring a password. Our credit union’s website doesn’t require a password in its 4 factor authentication. I couldn’t get that through the tech support agents’ (yes, there were multiple) heads. I got passed from one person to another. After getting a third email asking the same questions as previous emails, I decided enough was enough and deleted my account. I’m sure mint is a wonderful site. Too bad it has no flexibility for the requirements of different financial institutions.
Mint is unable to correct problems with my Chase account. This is an ongoing problem-months. Chase told me there is a simple fix if Mint would do it. I passed this along to their support team. No response, nada. Their support used to be good. Now it is the worst on the web. I have heard this problem over and over on the web. Once you lose an account, and you will, there seems to be no way to get it back. Beware!
I would like to provide more information but I am at the mercy of mint.com, and they have not responded to my requests for assistance. I can tell you that I am receiving alerts from the tech division of my investment company that mint.com is making repeated inquiries into my investment account and I do not have an account with mint.com…….Ironically, mint.com just contacted me via email. I suspect they have somehow viewed my posting with you or one I posted with clarkhoward.com. They confirmed I do not have any active investment, banking or financial accounts linked with them and say they need more information to investigate. I will post further after I communicate with them. Could be that someone is somehow reflecting the credentials of mint.com but the techs I spoke with (via phone) at my investment company felt the inquiries were coming from mint.com.
I am one of those who deeply regret ever visiting mint.com. I am not sure how they gained access to much of my personal and financial information but I am certain that it has caused a massive security breach that could have cost me a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in my retirement account had I not activated a unique multiple tier security feature offered by my investment company. Despite repeated requests, mint.com has failed to respond or to provide any support whatsoever. To this date, unknown sources attempt to access my retirement accounts via mint.com, and I can get absolutely no assistance from mint.com. My advice is to avoid sharing any information whatsoever with mint.com. Once the breach occurs and the genie is out of the bottle, you cannot fully repair the damage.
Delviaje,
Can you describe in more detail how someone could have accessed your account via mint.com? Two issues:
So they would have had to somehow gotten access of your account username/password to then login to the service you are using.
In many cases hackers get your account info by using the same user/password combination from other sites, and if your desktop computer is hacked they can capture your keystrokes and in some cases even your video.
How do you know for a fact this in-fact occurred through Mint and not via some other means including possible 401(k) provider’s own web site?
I’m not saying what you state is impossible, but highly unlikely. If it is, do want accurate information on the subject.
was very interested and went to use. BIG TURN OFF!
I have access to all my financial acts. And only enter passwords to sign on to their act. This program is asking me to give all my passwords and screen names. This puts my trust in someone else and either on line or within this program. Protecting your passwords is hard to do and even so allowing someone else access to all my acts. Seems a great place to hack. I trust intuit and use their products but NO I WILL NOT PLACE MY INFO ON SOMEONES SITE. I have program that tells me what card is best to use a x spot and does not ask even my name. Each of my financial acts are responsible for their own security.
Mint was a tremendous startup and had great customer service. They are now owned by Intuit who owns Quicken. Intuit is renowned for their horrible customer service. Mint is free but here are things you should know. I’ve used Quicken since 1984 (On an IBM XT and an Epson dot matrix) and Mint since it was beta.
It is also important to know that Mint is based around the financial novice who pretty much wants the software to tell them what to do. More ominously what fund to buy or bank to park their cash in.
Mint forces you into their categories. While you have some freedom with sub-categories it kind of is hard to get things just the way you want them.
Mint doesn’t give you running balances of your accounts.
Mint sometimes imports double entries from you financial institution. Sometimes it does not. They told their customers “not our problem take it up with your bank.”
Don’t contact their customer support. Just go online. Your mental health depends on it.
Quicken created a really bad Quicken Online and bought Mint a few of years ago to replace it and bolster their online reputation and pretty much have made no improvements at all. It’s as if they are afraid to touch anything.
There are no custom reports. if your finances are simple that doesn’t matter but if they are not it really does.
Why use Mint?
There is no competition. None. Quicken has had no improvements Mint has not because there is no incentive. Yes there are open source applications but have you seen them?
Bottom line. It’s pretty. It kind of works. But do you trust your money to “kind of.” Also don’t trust the reviews. Intuit is an old software company and an old hand a gaming the reviews.
SECURITY ISSUE: I recently received an email from Mint.com at my personal email address with a weird transaction from Bank of America. Out of curiosity, I logged into Mint with my personal email address and realized with shock that I was looking at someone else’s account with their cash balance, bank information and credit information. I contacted Mint immediately and expressed concern about their security. My email wasn’t returned until the next day where they asked me for a ton of information (screen shots, list of bank accounts, etc.). I was like – “hey, I contacted you out of mere courtesy. It’s your job to fix the problem and I’m not spending more of my time helping you fix your security issues.”
The major flaw in Mint is when users sign up and set their email address as the log-in, Mint does not verify the email address is actually their email address. So I’m getting emails from Mint for some poor woman from Fort Worth, TX. Wherever you are Fort Worth, TX woman, no one stole your account – you just typed in the wrong email address. Most internet product companies have email verification. Why not Mint?
Like with quickbooks, this software doesn’t project earnings or predict profits, despite what the marketing vaguely suggest. It makes boring historical data look pretty and charges you money for doing so..
Thanks for the great review. I’m an old MS Money user but switched to iBank about 5 years ago. I’ve recently analyzed how much time I spend using iBank in an attempt to determine how beneficial it has been. I’ve started to question the value of iBank, Quicken or any other tool like this. What attracts me to Mint is its simplicity and active budgeting features. Most of the tools like Quick and iBank have no ability to manage your finances as a service (i.e. txt’ing you as transactions pour in). I’ve found myself wondering … what exactly is the point of managing my finances like I do in iBank? What is the point of keeping track of where every single penny goes? Is this just an OCD manifesting? Is using iBank just a way to make me “feel like” I have my finances under control? Am I alone here or do others agree with me? I guess I’m trying to gain some validation from others out there because Mint + Personal Finance seem to be big winners here…
In August, I had credit union accounts begin showing me someone ELSE’s transactions! At the time, I’d forgotten my online info and my online access was locked. I called the credit union, changed my password, and finally updated the info in Mint. This caused the incorrect transactions to stop posting to my account. However, despite SIX WEEKS of email correspondence, Mint’s team cannot seem to make the transactions disappear from my account pages. This means all these bogus transactions that belong to someone who lives in Austin, Texas continue to mess up all of my budgeting.
Moreover, there’s another unsuspecting Mint user out there of whom I know every transaction they made for 4 weeks. I know what restaurants they went to, where they got groceries, and what day they traveled between Houston and Austin. I know that I can’t really do anything devious with that info (not that I would ever want to), but it’s a MAJOR privacy issue that Mint.com is obviously unable to fix. I’m starting to seriously question the competence of their technical crew, and might start looking for a different service. Like others have said, this is what you get with a free service I guess.
I am simply looking for a program that will take my bills and my income and tell me when to pay what bills and how much should be spent… heck my bank and give me a ton of free graphs and pie charts that track all my spending -dont need that . Looking to maximize my income to bills putting extra to savings .. have not found that yet 🙁
I started using Mint.com 4 or 5 years ago and it has helped me change my LIFE.
Yes, it’s buggy. Yes, it’s not perfect. But for free what more can you ask for. You find a way to make it work for you.
With anything if you don’t put forth the right effort, what you set out to do will ultimately fail.
You have be diligent. Categories items on a regular basis. Plan you budget each month. Address syncing issue best you can. Fix errors when they occur. Seems like a lot of heavy lifting but when it works and when you work with, it its great.
With a change in attitude, hard work, patients AND Mint I went from feeling like I was living paycheck to paycheck to being credit card free and having savings for my kids college, emergencies and home maintenance cost such as few roof or chimney repair. The only debt I have it is a loan for a modest house I purchased 2 years ago. (no store credit, not car debt… my 2005 ford escape works just fine thank you)
Mint isn’t perfect. You aren’t perfect. But if you have the right attitude and are willing to take a good hard look at your spending habits Mint can help you make a change for the better.
I can’t thank Mint enough!!!
Wait, till you lose all your historical data. We all feel that it is the great software till you face the loss of data. They lost my 8 years worth of history including classification of checks & cash expenses. All my year over year comparison is lost. I would highly recommend to buy Desktop version of financial management software..
I signed up with Mint 11 days ago. I spent several hours inputting my financial information, only to find that transactions from one of my credit cards (a popular US Airways card issued by Barclays) aren’t reported into the tool. I reported the problem to Mint and the issue is still not fixed. The only reason I haven’t dropped them yet is because I’m not yet willing to write off the up front investment of time that it took to set it up. But regretfully I wish I had selected another tool.
Hi Sam,
Our recommendation is using Personal Capital over Mint for the very reasons you mentioned.
Sam, totally agree with Larry. I linked a savings account into Mint which stopped updating July 2014. Sent problem email to them and about a month later they say its fixed. Do not know what they are looking at since no transactions coming over almost a year later. Issues with Yodlee are that they show incorrect monthly balances, also every screen will show a different amount. For example If you look at Net Worth they will show a different Net Worth amount on every screen.
Don’t get fooled. Mint is buggy, and the support is virtually non-existent. Even if you are initially pleased with its capabilities, you will ultimately be frustrated as the application fails to perform simple operations correctly over time. Program design is subject to change without notice, which means that features you once relied on are no longer there. The feckless customer support will further frustrate you. I’m being generous when I say that reporting problems to Mint is difficult. And, it’s about as effective as reporting the problems to your houseplants.
In WellsFargo website you can create “guest accounts” with “view-only” mode.
This is enough for Mint and safe for the user.
I have used Mint for several years now, primarily because of direct access to the bank accounts. However, since inception it has never been better than a 5/10. It misses the absolutely essential features of bank reconciliation and import of transaction ability.
It’s a wannabe accounting package. When they came out with the iPad version, I thought they were on a path to radical improvement. The IPad programmers need to be congratulated! However, my praise stops there. The iPhone version is terrible and the browser version is very average and needs a real makeover.
But here is the real beef. Their support is absolutely useless. First of all, it appears that they outsource to foreign countries and the the support staff don’t understand English or are not properly trained. For example, I have had two major issues and both of them were not resolved. In the first instance I accidentally deleted the wrong account and lost two years of data which couldn’t be recovered although the banks had the data available. Despite many hours of frustration there was no way to retrieve the data because there is no import facility.
My current experience is even worse. One of my accounts is not updating and hasn’t been for three weeks. I have been trying to get support on this matter and have had five different support people tell me how sorry they are and that the problem has been escalated to their engineers. But no response. I tried to phone them but could not find a phone number. Now folks, if the company hides its phone number so that support cannot be reached by phone, then you must know that there are real issues.
To make matters worse, Mint is owned by Intuit, makers of Quickbooks and a public company. What does it say about the company and it’s management if they block communication? What does it say about the company if they are having a technical issue for over three weeks and nobody is prepared to own the problem and let their customer know how it is being resolved.
Five different support people all responding with different answers, some absolutely irrelevant and one or two people saying the problem has been escalated. To whom …well nobody knows.
If you want real budgeting and accurate records, Mint is not the right choice. Try a company like YNAB. I use their software and can vouch for its excellence. It’s not free but it has only a one time purchase price of about $60 . And by the way I’ve tried Quicken as well and they too lost all my data when I purchased an upgrade and something went wrong. Quickbooks is being challenged by companies like Xero and will start to lose market share, which they have had the privilege of dominating for a long time. But I think for Intuit the writing is on the wall due to a culture where customer service takes second place. Good luck and don’t be fooled by FREE. You get what you pay for..
Thanks for the great info! I’m going to check out Mint for sure…I’ve been interested in getting my finances in top shape since I just started a career after graduating from college. I’ve been using Credit Sesame to help boost my credit score, to plan for long term expenses like home loans.
I’ve used Mint.com for 4 months and I just love it. I had one connection problem and it was solved within 12 hours. I wish it had bill pay, but my bank has that, so that’s fine.
I love how the goals work. The budgeting takes a bit to setup, but I’ve found that with every budgeting program. It auto-categorizes everything and learns as you correct. It matches Loans with Assets pretty well. And the Overview is fantastic. I love seeing my Net Worth creep up every month. ($618,000 today).
The suggestions (ads) are the first ads I’ve ever seen that are actually helpful. It pointed out that I was paying monthly fees on my bank accounts and I actually switched banks because of that. I didn’t like Chase bank much anyway. It knows what interest rate I’m paying on my credit cards and suggested new cards with no annual fee and much less interest rates (some with 0% for 15 months).
It looks like a lot of people have had issues. I just haven’t. I love Mint.com and I hope they keep improving it or add a Premium version which will let me pay bills with it.
I’ve used MINT for about a year now and have generally found it easy to use and helpful in tracking my spending and accounts (checking, savings, brokerage, 401K, amex CC). Recently, all of my transactions are showing up as “UNCATEGORIZED.” This has rendered the service utterly useless to me. Based on the forums, I’m not the only one suffering from the product glitch. Hopefully an update be will be released soon. Otherwise I suggest finding an alternate solution.
Larry, thanks for your suggestions. Yodlee is new to me. An industrial-strength expenses aggregator is really all I’m looking for since I run my own analytics on spreadsheet with proprietary categories. Personal Capital was going to be my next stop, but I will add Yodlee to the list.
Does Mint allow for multiple users for the same mint account? If so, do both log-in with the same username/password or are those different?
KP,
No the only web app that allows this is Yodlee. Check out our review.
Mint does support multiple mobile devices.
I don’t understand how anybody can recommend Mint. It’s essentially unusable for me. The servers are agonizingly slow, and the Category functionality simply does not work. Trying to change Categories is hit or miss — some changes take, some don’t.What a mess! I suspect Quicken is letting it die, especially the free version, to get people to switch to its legacy software. I can’t stand it any more.
Mint has just one advantage — its ability to autolink to your accounts and sweep in your data.
I just have one question. Can anybody recommend another platform that has the autolink feature with decent analytical functionality and a committed team that stands behind it?
Hi John,
Yes we recommend Personal Capital for the reasons you describe:
https://investorjunkie.com/13093/personal-capital-review/
Larry –
Thanks for your review. The user comments and your responses are what I found most valuable. I have been working towards finding the right tools and services for my needs and it sounds like I am not alone in searching for the right formula. I wold be grateful for some pointers.
I have my own business and also own rental properties. I have 5 online accounts with Chase. I have a trusted bookkeeper who I have weaned off of spreadsheets and we use Quickbooks Pro 2006 for Macs. I have considered upgrading Quickbooks but I have been scared off by horror stories and know that Intuit is not Mac friendly. My IT consultant has suggested that I purchase a laptop just for Quickbooks windows. Do you think that is wise? My reaction was always that it would complicate instead of streamline and I have been waiting for a good mac based small business solution.
I have used Mint for years now. I googled your article because I was trying to get more functionality out of it and collapse any duplicate processes or systems . I use Mint to aggregate all of my info. I like the easy on the go access and up to the minute view of my net worth. My bookkeeper is not yet maximizing all of the online banking features which should help with some of my issues.
Based on my specific situation any software thought? Any advice on what to do about Mac Quickbooks Pro 2006
For a business, we recommend Quickbooks Online over the desktop edition on either platform. If you must, virtualize Windows and use QuickBooks for Windows instead of the Mac version. See our review for more details.
https://investorjunkie.com/4183/quickbooks-online-review/
I am an active investor with a decent portfolio spread across several brokerages, banks etc. and 2 rental properties I would like to keep better track of.
I have been using Mint for about 3 years now but am frustrated by the lack of reporting and the updates breaking from time to time.
Is Quicken 2014 – Rental the right answer or is there a different product I should look at first? I don’t do much with the budget function of Mint…really only transaction aggregation at this point.
I dread converting over the 50+ accounts from Mint to Quicken (remembering what the usernames and pwds are and losing the history) – but seems I might be at that point. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Hi Rob,
Sounds like Personal Capital is more of a fit for you (at least for online services) compared to Mint.com. See our Personal Capital review for more details. Though it doesn’t track rentals (just like Mint.com)
Quicken is the most comprehensive and does transactions. So it’s not a read only app. If you are really serious about managing your rental properties and is a business, why not use Quickbooks or Quickbooks Online?
Thanks Larry – I just took a look at the Personal Capital threads and website – and it looks like that may certainly be a step up. I figure it’s going to be a pain to transition to either quicken, quickbooks or something else so figured I’d ask what the right one was before diving in. I’ll take a look at quickbooks.
Thanks!
Hello.
I saw your review on Mint. What I am looking for is basic. I want to be able to put all my monthly expenses ie: house payment, car payment, cable, electric, phone ect….. with account numbers, phone numbers, due date, amount due, amount paid… ect all in one place and have it calculate for me. Is there a free on line budgeter like that?
Thanks!
Victoria
Hi Victoria. Quicken sounds like your best bet then since the online aggregators are read only.
Besides Quicken, as Brian in Austin noted, Moneydance is a real alternative.
I was so unhappy with how Quicken would abandon old software (e.g. the Mac platform) and force me to upgrade to new stuff I really didn’t want, that Moneydance is my preference. It may not be quite as smooth an interface as Quicken, but the same code works on Windows, Mac, Linux, etc, which means my choices aren’t constrained. And I can get plugins and even make my own scripts to add new features.
http://moneydance.com/
As several comments have clarified, Mint’s publicity is misleading and bogus. But it is safer with some banks than with others. E.g. capitalone360.com lets you create an “access code” which only allows mint to have read-only access to your data. Though, as discussed at https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/10820/could-mint-com-be-more-secure-and-if-so-how/15197#15197 this still leaves other possibilities for withdrawal open.
Are there any alternatives to Mint.com besides Personal Capital Review?
Even pay services that are not free?
Yes see:
https://investorjunkie.com/24249/mint-com-alternatives/
I’m sorry I did not find all of these comments before today. I posted this on satisfaction.mint.com:
I tried Mint today because of some good reviews out there. The transaction history limitation is a severe limitation making Mint not a valid solution unless you are willing to live without the transaction details needed to build a good budget. I’m not willing to start from scratch and live without the history, so I am closing the account the same day it was opened. It’s too bad the reviews did not point this out as I would not have tried Mint had I known about the limitation.
Larry, you said in this article that you’re using Excel spreadsheets for keeping track of everything. Is there a specific template you use or could point us to along with a crash course in financial tracking using Excel? I’ve been using MS Money for a few years now but it’s starting to get outdated and there are some things on it that need fixed which will never happen now that they have discontinued it, so I’d like to look at other options that aren’t using third party websites.
Hi CJ, I use Excel spreadsheets to track things asset allocation for our retirement. Unfortunately no my spreadsheet isn’t ready for others to use nor do I know of any good templates.
mint is a joke. You cannot produce reports sorted by date so it is useless for tracking expenses month by month on a spreadsheet, and useless for tax prep. The website is a mess – very hard to navigate, hard to find options, etc. What the heck is “trends” for example.
I would love to find an alternative, even if I have to pay a small fee.
I am not using any personal finance software now but I want to start. I use Apple products at home (MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone). I do not want to use Mint (weak investing support, no online bill payment, no bank reconciliation capability). I also don’t want to use Quicken for Mac Essentials. I am interested in the VMWare Fusion workaround so I can use Quicken on my MacBook. I understand that you can use VMWare Fusion to transfer an existing Windows based Quicken application and data to Mac, but can you use it to start using Quicken for windows on a Mac on a de novo basis?
You can use VMWare Fusion on your Macintosh.
The software is just broken. It looked great at first, but as soon as you try to use it, basic calculations, like the value of your stock portfolio, are wrong. It’s horribly broken. This is not to mention that customer service is non-existent. The forums are full of people complaining about various issues, none of which get resolved. (I have occasionally seen a fig leaf of an answer, when a moderator will ask someone to send a one-on-one email and close the topic and pretend that the issue is due to a customer-specific fluke and not the whole damn system being broken.) Because they are so apparently understaffed, I have a lot of trouble believing their “bank-level” security claim. (For one thing, a basic username and password as the only authentication for every user is not bank-level security, so it’s false on its face.) It’s a scandal that anyone takes this site seriously.
Mint Credit Monitoring is terrible. Not worth the $200 upfront fee they charge. Customer service was poor. Questions were never answered correctly. Going back to MyFico because it is more reliable.
I was so happy to find Mint, but am now telling all to beware. My accounts are listing duplicate transactions and RE-duplicating the same ones day after day. I’m up to 42 times on Morgan Stanley today and 39 on Schwab. Mint Customer Service, which used to send a response within 24 hours — form letter thought it may have been — now doesn’t respond at al. And it’s been over a week. When you go on the Community Forum you see the same complaints going back YEARS and no end in sight. All I can trust Mint for now is to keep tabs of cash transaction categories.
Hi all,
I’m a relatively advanced investor (investments here and directly in foreign countries) and I’ve tried Mint and Personal Capital. I like Mint and use it, but mostly for monthly budget work. I used to use Money before it and it’s definitely a step down from Money in capabilities, but it works. While my investment accounts in the US do load properly in Mint, I don’t really use Mint for investment tracking. I do use another tool, Fund Manager which is not cloud based, but rather desktop based. It’s excellent for tracking investments, not just funds either (it does options, stocks, funds , etc). So Mint for monthly finances, and Fund Manager for investment tracking.
I have gone through 3 or 4 iterations of trying to get mint.com to function adequately over the past 3 or 4 years, including right now. This time around, I have the same issue I have had every time. I have between 15 and 20 accounts, and 20% of them won’t load. In my previous experiences, I’ve received the same poor service as described above, with no resolution after several months. If even a couple of accounts can’t load properly, my overall financial picture is skewed, and Mint is useless. Without the ability to manually enter data for problematic account, Mint use is an exercise in constant frustration. As someone else said, if you’re young or have only a handful of basic accounts to track, Mint can be a great tool. If you want a complete picture of your finances, you need a tool that won’t have gaping holes.
This is overhyped crying. Yes it’s true that Mint used to use yodlee (the industry standard) to aggregate data from all of your banking sites, and it always worked without issue. When Quicken took over, they replaced yodlee with their own (broken) backend aggregator. Yes it will periodically fail for some accounts and it can remain broken for weeks (support can’t help).
However, for the majority of accounts, these problems don’t occur, and for the accounts that do have trouble, those connections will eventually start working again after a few weeks. Yes it’s horribly annoying when it happens to you, but it doesn’t happen to most people, and the problems are usually not permanent.
I do use other sites as well, and ALL others use yodlee as the backend, and they never break. I certainly wish Mint would go back to their old aggregator, but the front end web interface is still the best one available, and it’s the best choice for most consumers.
I just want to be another voice in this sea of voices to urge someone reading this NOT to use Mint.com. I am not writing about the security issues (if one is willing to use a site like this, then you must assume they have already made the decision to share their bank info and login) but about the ease of use or lack thereof. Mint used to be great. It’s user interface is downright *dreamy* if you ask me – colorful charts and graphs will get me every time! I loved that I could tag transactions by who did the spending in my family and then compare each person’s spending in any given category (Yes, I got petty and compared how much I spend at the coffee shop each month to how much my husband spends so I could show him a chart!) and that a lot of the hard work sorting through transactions and categorizing them was done for me – or easily managed by “rules” I could set in place at the same time I was editing any given transaction (unlike on Adaptu….). But Mint has gone down the tubes. It’s is terrible now. As many other people before me have stated I have been unable to update my accounts for weeks and customer support is THE WORST and they keep sending stock emails that feel somewhat patronizing in nature and then saying the issue is resolved when it absolutely is NOT. Please do yourself a favor and don’t waste a precious moment of your life getting caught in Mint’s web. It is not worth it. Pinch a penny, save your sanity!
Thanks for reviewing Mint & Personal Capital. I have been using the retired Microsoft’s Money product (free) and find it meets my needs quit well (rental property, investments) without Quicken’s constant reminders to upgrade after 2 or 3 years — plus I found several errors in Quicken that were really pathetic. I used Quicken for about 10 years prior to Money.
With money I do have to log into my financial websites and download the transactions. If I could skip that part it would be worth switching to Personal Capital, but was scared off by your review — that it doesn’t work for different tax accounts (by the way were you talking IRA vs non-IRA?).
Thanks again for posting your review.
Hi Jeff B,
Personal Capital DOES work with tax deffered accounts. The issue is in the reporting they don’t consider it tax deferred (ie stating a mutual fund is tax inefficient when in an IRA account). So transactions from your accounts will work with Personal Capital no problem.
Great review! I’ve been looking for a simple budgeting app, and was recommended mint.com by a co-worker. Also, if security is a concern, here’s a blog article from the NY Times outlining the mint.com security infrastructure: https://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/should-you-trust-mint-com/?_r=5. They seem to take these concerns very seriously.
Step 1: Give us your online bank userID and password
> F* that … I stopped right there. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I think you guys are nuts to hand over this kind of info to a website … this month, I tracked my expenses using the Google docs spreadsheet when I came across mint.com … but when I saw Step 1 … I said, “forget it” … I’m quite surprised at how many ppl are willing to hand over the keys to such private information …
I, too, stopped at the “give us your online bank userid and password.” Really? Here – let me give you my cc number and ssn while I’m at it. . .
Hi Jack and Mrs Thomas. If you want to understand more of Mint.com’s security you can visit their web site at:
https://www.mint.com/how-mint-works/security
While your concern isn’t completely baseless, the chances of this occurring are pretty slim. There are much easier methods in which a hacker can gain entry to your information. Typically most user’s computer is more insecure method. This isn’t to say either that your bank security themselves is completely foolproof. There have been reported cases of banks being hacked at various levels along the security chain.
So you have to ask the question with any online service, how much do you trust the provider’s security?
I typically am pretty cynical as my husband is the manager of the production control portion of a computer center. I am the product of 27 years of a security conscience husband. 🙂
I have not ruled out mint.com completely. I do want to give Quicken a chance since I’ve used it since the demise of Microsoft Money. . .which I miss terribly. Quicken just doesn’t have some of the functionality I desire. We’ll see. . .
Thank you so much for your response. I appreciate your review of mint.com – especially for those of us who research before handing out sensitive information.
I do mention in another post some Mint alternatives. Some are locally installed applications, like Quicken.
https://investorjunkie.com/24249/mint-com-alternatives/
Though IMO none are as complete as Quicken.
Larry,
You totally miss the point. I never mentioned any concerns over the quality of Mint.com’s security measures. My main concern is giving Mint, a website that I happened to come across, my personal bank info. Who is Mint, what do they do, what can they NOW do once they get the keys to my bank acct, etc. Who keeps Mint in check? Who knows what they are doing “behind the scenes” with such personal info?
That being said, I don’t care how wonderful mint.com’s security is or isn’t. If people want to hand over the keys to their bank account to some entity on the Internet, that is their prerogative. It’s a free country … as for me, I choose not to.
As always, caveat emptor (let the buyer beware).
ALL financial tracking/budgeting products work this way. You either provide your various banking websire credentials or you don’t use their services.
As a side note, I also do use mint (have for several years), and I definitely like their website and the transaction tracking it provides. Other posters have commented on the trouble they have with some accounts not updating properly for extended periods. That is true and it’s caused because Intuit wrecked mint’s data aggregation software when they bought them. Every other major financial institution uses yodlee as their back end data aggregator, and it works perfectly. For some reason, Intuit insists on using its own technology, which is broken. 🙁
Having said that, I don’t really have any troubles anymore with the few banks that I have it connected to. You could also just go directly to yodlee.com and they offer the same service, and its data aggregation never fails. I actually use both services. I like them both quite a bit but Mint has a better web interface.
I’ve used Mint for about a year, after having given up on MS Money. I found Mint useful for a shallow look at personal finance and as long as your finances were relatively uncomplicated, they worked well. It does have nice features for hiding certain catagories from reports which was useful when I moved money around to purchase a car.
However, as far as handling investments, it’s really not up to speed for anything then checking balances. I started using an app called “Fund Manager” https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/ ). I’ve found for investments this to be REALLY good. It’s not for beginners, more for folks who have tried tracking more complicated portfolio’s in Quicken or Mint. I have a bunch of investments across a few countries due to having lived abroad and this program really handled multiple currencies & multiple markets well.
Thanks Aaron for the app mention. I’ll check it out, though curious how it compares to Quicken.
All,
I am a Mac user. Options are limited for financial software for Macs that are as professional and bug free as Quicken. Therefore I have had to keep a PC around to use Quicken. I am looking for a software that I can use on multiple Macs that is cloud based for syncing. I can’t seem to find one that is not buggy. I will say that I am intrigued by Mint but not sure of the security aspect of the software. Thanks Larry for the video review. My question is this. What do you recommend for a hybrid software that I can use? Or is my security concerns for Mint overblown?
STOP and think before using this product. While it is a very sexy, sleek interface with nice infographics, it is by no means a product to manage your finances. First off it is a one way read only connection, which requires a two step process for any kind of bill payment. Really not that convienent as marketed, for sure. Mint is an infographics display of posted and pending transasctions in your accounts, which excludes payments which are scheduled for future or not yet posted or pending. The idea of circumventing overdraft fees remains a real possibility. I suppose the real niche of the product is the ability to rifle through your transactions and roughly assign a category, which is the process people find the most time consuming, and most won’t do it.
I also think as the previous poster stated, the revenue generating and marketing ability of the product.is huge. While it is subjective, Patzer is a startup entreprenuer engineer, not an accountant or a personal finance expert and the core product reflects it. In my opinion, while brilliant the product is a glorified smokescreen to gather consumer financial data, demographics, income and sell that information for revenue. Basically it wasn’t designed to better enable you to manage your money, but more so to market specific products and services based on your demographic and get you to consume and spend. If you really want your entire financial profile out there on front street, it’s a dangerous proposition. Let the GenY’s have it since their money management skills are non existent.
Bob,
While I agree on the part you mention about the data collection, I do think Mint.com is useful for the audience it targets. I do think it adds enough value to help better track and manage your finances. Keep in mind most individuals have nothing and this is a big step up.
Yes I agree with you, there is a market for the product. However plenty of caveats which people need to made aware of if they choose.
Just too very basic and inaccurate categorization make it pretty useless. This truely is a product for those that are money dumb and take no inititive in managing their finances. It’s the easy way out, where you just spend, and it trys to aggregate thoses transaction in nice little categories, so you can spend some more. Reading so many reviews, it’s inaccurate to say this product will kill Quicken because there is nothing to compare.
The real power of Mint is the data mining capabilities of the software, marketed and sold for millions of dollars. Thats what this is all about. As for a replacement to a full service desktop accounting personal finance application, it is not.
Does anyone out there know of a financial software or web-based service that allows to set your own budgets/categories and enter/edit transactions categories on a mobile app? I signed up for mint, but it does allow the manipulation of their categories. I use quicken and once had a palm pilot that allowed me to enter and sync transactions with the software, but they don’t have support this.
I’m not sold on any one software and would gladly switch to the service provider or purchase a robust financial software that does have a mobile app.
Hi W Musico,
Mint allows you to edit your transactions, just like the web site. You don’t need to enter manual transactions since it’s done automatically when the transactions are downloaded. There is nothing to sync.
It also allows to edit the transaction via the iPhone app.
As far adjusting budgets, you can do this via the iPhone app.
The only thing you cannot do is create new categories via the mobile app.
The iPad app have more features than the iPhone version. The iPhone version is really meant for quickly looking at your personal finance.
Hope this helps.
To me providing them my banks ids and passwords were the main factors of not using mint regardless of what they claim. The rest of issue are secondary.
In short, would you give me your bank’s login credentials?
I have two unusable Mint logins. After a time, Mint makes changes to
the behavior of it’s program that cause problems aggregating data.
Mint is unable or unwilling to address these issues. The customer
support at Mint is practically non-existant. Although they are
polite, they are ineffective. Save yourself some aggravation and
avoid using Mint altogether.
I completely agree. Almost every time I login, there’s another one of my banks that’s not updating with Mint. And their customer service drones can only spit back canned answers at me.
Now that my primary bank has been blocking them for the past 3 weeks (and each point points the finger at the other for being the cause of it), I think it’s time for me to give up on Mint.
I kept all of my financial data on Quicken 2004, which did most all I needed. The one thing that bothered me was that ai had to enter regular monthly transactions manually, every month, which was time consuming. I kept all of my data backed up in a separate directory on my hard drive. Of course the hard drive died and took ALL of my data and backups with it. I am now using a Mac, and thought that Mint might be the solution,, but, in order to get my financial records in line, I have to reenter all of my info going back to Dec 2010. It appears that Mint cannot do this. Am i correct? Tried IEEE and iBank4 and both were more than I needed. Thinking of Checkbook Pro or MoneyWiz if Mint does not work. Any help is appreciated.
The only option you have is sticking with Quicken.
Mint is a good idea but does not work – it is an exercise in futility – sometimes the accounts work well and download and other times they don;t so it really is not useful unless it is consistent. Their solutions …well….there are none for the most part other than answering your email with the same solution every time even when it does not work the first 7 times. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?
Who has the time to constantly ask for solutions to their issues !
I used mint for about 10 days then it just occurred to me it is not okay to hand out my financial info to any other person/firm/government. Question is simple….! Why would you want give your banking information to someone else regardless what they say or how secure they claim they are. Yes the interface is definitely attractive and useful no doubt about it. But I prefer to keep my private info on my on devices as they go through daily backup so no worries if my disk crashes. I don’t even use cloud based services to backup my other non-financial data. If I am in Europe, Asia or Australia, why would I release my banking info to a US based organisation. I might use it if I live in the US.
I have iBank, MoneyWell 2, iCompta, iFinance and lots of other apps installed but I prefer using MoneyWell and currently use it as my primary financial application. Switching between apps is easy if I ever go with any other app.
But no to Mint.
I know that Mint.com only aggregates status of accounts, not management. But the idea of it still scares me.
As a security professional, the main reason I would NOT use Mint is simply my trust for a company like MINT (Intuit) to manage the aggregate information I process through their services. Fundamentally, I really have no idea what they do with the information that is aggregated by their application. For that reason alone, I refuse to use a product that I know has explicit (and implicit) questions around the privacy of my information.
I agree with the author about cloud-based apps and security — thumbs down. I want my stuff on my own disk. If I lose it, my bad. I was a victim of the Sony Playstation Network break-in. Even though they only got my e-mail and started using it to spam all my friends, it was quite upsetting and a hassle to undo. Again, if I lose my wallet, my mistake — I’ll deal with it, but I don’t want to deal with someone stealing my SSN, address and account numbers from some data location beyond my control. No thanks.
I’m curious to see how well this goes having read all the comments. I keep a budget using Mac’s Numbers program and am hoping to find a faster cheap alternative. I do not mind going into Mint and correcting the expenditure category of ATM withdrawals and “Uncategorized” as sometimes computer programs cannot read the mind of a human. I understand the inherent risks of putting so much information into one place and not having another human to point to, spit on, and blame if something goes wrong. I hope, however, to begin recommending Mint to family and friends by next fall/winter, when nothing has gone wrong during that whole time and I’ve seen an improvement in my savings.
I think mint is a little scary. I’d rather have the option of not putting my account information AND passwords in, but be able to enter my credit card balances and activity manually as I do transactions instead.
Mint is a terrific concept and the app is a well thought out and elegant implementation of that concept. However, since Mint was bought by Inuit, the customer and technical support has been terrible. The majority of my accounts work fine, but I have been dealing with a host of issues with one of my accounts for the past 8 months. I have exchanged nearly 50 emails with Mint customer support and have yet to see the issues resolved. Nearly 20 of the emails represent exchanges when I have received what appears to be automated responses informing me that the problem has been solved and that the trouble ticket had been closed. This has been incorrect in EVERY case. None of the issues have been solved and the trouble tickets have to be reopened and often rehashed from the beginning. I have asked to speak to a technician on the phone to better explain the problems or to troubleshoot in real time, only to be told that this is not possible. I have asked that my case be escalated or that I be allowed to engage with a more senior visions service of technical representative (after 8 months on the same problem this seems appropriate) and have again been told that this is not possible.
So, great concept, great app, terrible support. If you happen to have accounts at institutions that Mint plays with its great. But if any of your institutions change their policies or systems, watch out. You could loose everything.
I have been using regular old envelopes as my “system” to pay bills and try to figure out where our money goes. We have a checking account, 2 savings and a very small 401K. I have only 1 credit card with a $175.00 balance, which I keep for something to report to our credit, plus a car loan.
Is mint safe enough to use to create a budget and to try to help me cut back and start saving towards retirement. I’m almost 45 and am realizing that I have to do something now. I am on my Android phone all the time – I should be more aware of what and when I am spending. I am NEED something. Preferably free is the best since we are very limited on $$….I just want to be sure it’s safe and we won’t lose the little bit of money that we have. We struggle weekly. Thanks.
Mint.com sucks because the Everything category is messed up. When you click on it, it lists the budget accounts instead of the individual transactions. Also you can’t click on it when trying to view the app on your phone. You can’t see if it was put into the right category or not. This unbelievably horrible.
Within a week or so of setting up my mint.com account, some small payments showed up as multi-thousand-dollar Income items. I reported the issue and about a week later received an email saying the problem had been corrected. I responded that it had NOT been corrected. About another week later I received another email saying the problem had been corrected. (Nope, it’s still not corrected.) MINT IS UNTRUSTWORTHY (and the customer support is certainly non-responsive). I’m deleting my account now, and will be highly suspicious of using any mint (or Quicken) resources in the future. Very disappointed; I had looked forward to using it.
I would agree! I have 9 months of transaction data on mint which cannot be recovered. My account does not work and has not worked for over a month now! Mint has told me it was fixed 4 times now! I am not over exaggerating when I say, their customer service is worse than any other I have experienced.
I would NOT use Mint again. If you ever have a problem forget about getting it resolved. MINT SUPPORT IS ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE!!!!!! There is no support phone number, only email. My Mint has not been working for a month now and they are doing nothing to fix it.
I have put in many hours since May, 2011 making mint work in a way useful to me, by some workarounds. I really have loved it, as it served my purpose UNTIL!!! there was a problem for about a month connecting with my bank. That was back in Oct/Nov 2011. I can not now fix the problems this caused, making all my work useless. I don’t mind fixing occasional problems — but as far as I can find FIXING things is next to impossible. WHY WHY WHY can I not do manual entries for anything before December 1, 2011 to fix this glitch, not even to mention trying to get them out of pending??? I’ve tried many ways to work around this — even at the cost of making my monthly expenses inaccurate for Oct-Dec, but I still won’t end up correct checking account balance. I am now searching for a solution (I don’t even mind buying) that will allow you to WORK WITH the software. But looking at Quicken’s site, I can’t tell what I can do to fix errors, etc. The reports they show look identical to mint, which I liked, but I certainly don’t want to PAY for the priviledge of wasting many, many hours to find out errors can’t be fixed (or categories customized).
In ‘another lifetime’ I was a mainframe programmer, so I understand things that ‘seem simple’ on the surface to the public are many times extremely hard to do — however — mainstream software should not have such limitations and be as big as mint is. I also wish there was some kind of ‘user manual’ — I did not not a few FAQ’s or their user forum very usable.
Barbara,
Quicken is a full blown personal finance app. You can make changes to any downloaded transaction.
I still have Quicken 2006 running for tracking my bank and investment accounts on my Macs. I do not use this in relation to on-line banking in any way; just as account registers with information manually entered and reconciled with monthly statements. I can make reports and see where cash flow and investment accounts are at any time. I can also see updated net worth with a push of a button. I’m too lazy and fearful of stolen information to set this up directly with financial institutions. So this works for me, but my problem is simple. Intuit’s Quicken 2006 is OLD OLD OLD. I’m always doing triple backups on external formats in fear of the whole thing crashing someday. I would love to have a Mac update of Quicken, but since that doesn’t exist, can anyone recommend a fresh, user friendly system that will take me safely forward?
Great comments! These forums are the best resource to get our Real world experience’s out and open to the public to help us all make better decisions.
I was a mint.com user for over a year, and I worked very hard at making it work for me. I too had all of the same issues, from tax preperation syncing issues to financial institution sync issues. I do understand that it is a 2 way street (information HWY actually) between Intuit and the financial institutions – however as others have questioned, why are there more sync issues with mint than with Quicken, when both are Intuit companies?
However, by biggest concern with mint is similar to my concern with Facebook, from personal experiences. After being with mint for just over a year I noticed an increase in marketing material sent my way (via mail and electronic), and on one particular credit card offer the credit card company stated that I had great credit and had a line item list, without institution names of my current credit accounts with extremly accurate balances! I continued to receive more offers that contained very accurate financial figures as related to my personal accounts. The numbers were so accurate it was just like logging into mint.com and I felt vulnerable – and then the light went on.
Of course I contacted mint and sent a very detailed reply as I deleted every piece of information in my account as quickly as possible and closed my account. I did not hear a word from mint, confirming or denying supplying my personal and or financial information to other financial institutions.
Shortly after closing my account the unusual number of marketing offers stopped and I have never received another offer that contained my personal financial balances.
So how does mint really make money? How does Facebook really make money? Our own personal information is worth millions…. Be very careful in providing so much personal information to any single institution.
I’m going to stick with a combination of solutions until the “cloud” is perfected.
Thank you for this post. I have been using YouNeedABudget, but still find it tedious to maneuver. I almost made a mint.com account. Thanks for helping me choose to say no to Mint. I wish there was a secure alternative, even if it cost $$.
Mint is basically a toy, and I find it to be more or less useless. It does not support downloads from some of the major banks and other institutions, and does not allow manual entry of data from institutions that are not supported for automated download. So you wind up with garbage in and garbage out. It comes up with budgets and suggestions based on crude general data mining – in my case, missing the mark by a mile. Nice alpha – needs a lot of refinement.
I’ve heard Mint is pretty good although I haven’t tried it myself. I like the graph in the pic that you included. Security is one of my concerns for not having signed up but nothing is completely secure these days so I’m sure the benefits are worth the risk. In the meantime I track all my stuff in spreadsheets which works pretty well it’s just a manual process. -Sydney
Sadly, I confess that i use my profile on mint as my ultimate source of financial management ;(. I really need to get more secure, and use quicken, which happens to be the same developers of mint, a company that has a long history safeguarding extremely sensitive financial data. But it still seems scary, but again, Mint doesn’t attach your name to your financial data. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Mint.com doesn’t allow users to transfer money. So even if crooks got your Mint password, they could only see what you have and not directly steal it. But still… I really shouldn’t use it, just in case XD
I have spent a lot of time setting up and trying to use Mint.com. It has the potential to be a great site and helpful to many but I had nothing but problems. The site is based on the ability to load your bank account and others accounts to the site and see an overall view and set a budget. The site continues to have problems in downloading my bank accounts balances and charges. I send a error report and complaint about the problem and they reset the link and it works for a day or so. Then it will not update again. It has been an on going problem that they don’t seem to be able to fix or care about. Every time I have the problem I check directly my bank account online and there is never a problem but for so reason Mint.com gets locked out or something and can’t keep my account up to date. So, when I want to check and use Mint.com it is not up to date and it takes hours if not a day to get it fixed. I have lost count on the number of times I have complained about this and nothing changes. So, what should be and could be a very valuable site to many, has been nothing but a pain. Just a word of caution, that if you want to spend a good bit of time setting up your Mint.com file, be aware it may not work very well at all. I am throwing in the towel and giving this site a failing grade. Don’t have time to continue to chase it. JUST BEWARE!!!!!
Steh,
I’ve had the SAME problem lately so I feel your pain! I have spent HUNDRED of hours (no lie!!) manually updating nearly every entry shown from nearly 2 years worth of transactions so that I could get a TRULY accurate account of my spending in various categories for the main purpose of creating and managing a budget. And now, after all of that time, it seems all a waste of time because my account has not updated in EIGHT DAYS (credit union I use updated/changed their URL login-in link and Mint CSR’s can’t seem to figure out how to remove the old link and replace it with the new one). Seriously – that’s the problem.
I am SOOO done with Mint.com AND Intuit programs. I’m going to spend some $$ to purchase software that does this in hopes that I will find program with a customer service dept. that takes phone calls. No guarantee but anything has got to be better than this!!!
By the way, did you ever get your problem resolved?? If so, how long did it take????
(here’s my comments from my own post) – It might be a decent program (remember, you get what you pay for) but their “customer service” is HORRIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No phone number to call – just email, which is maddening! I have been waiting EIGHT days for the site to update my account with my credit union’s new URL link!! EIGHT DAYS to change the old URL to the new one!!! Meanwhile, nothing is being updated in my account and it’s VERY frustrating!!!!
Even MORE frustrating is that I keep getting the same auto-generated responses to my emails from ‘people’ like “Ahmad”, “Fariz”, “Febry” (are these even people???) every time I inquire about when the link will be updated . . . “Thank you so much for your email. We love hearing from you, whether you’re sharing a great testimonial or something we’d better fix. All of us are working really hard to make Mint better for you.” BLAH BLAH BLAH!!
So if you decide to use the program and spend many, many hours changing information to make it correct, just be prepared if something goes wrong because you will be waiting a VERY LONG TIME for the fix!!!!!
Thanks for the great review on Mint. I am really new at online or offline budget software – I am the worst when it comes to finances. I pay my bills on time, my credit is ok but what I am looking for is a program that will tell me what to pay first, how much to pay and then what to do with what is leftover – if anything.
I am currently working two jobs, I have a lot of cc debt and I need guidance. I am too embarrassed to ask for help face to face with an advisor and I really can’t afford to pay fees.
What software program is best for me?
Help!!!
Hi Aimee,
Mint sounds like it’s the best for your situation.
You might look into Dave Ramsey – Financial Peace University.
You def need Dave Ramsey before any of these online systems. He’ll take you back to the old school way of doing things but he will get you to debt free if you follow what he tells you. THEN you can start thinking of how to track your money in such a way.
You might try YouNeedABudget (YNAB). They have lots of helpful classes and a great community forum. It is super easy to use and you don’t have to worry about broken account sync.
Excellent review. Thank you for putting it together. I’m was a long time user of Microsoft Money. In fact, when I made the switch to OSX I too invested in Fusion to maintain my use of Money. I was saddened by Microsoft’s exit from the market but also saw some opportunity to choose a new option. I reviewed tens of different options including Mint, Quicken for Mac (a steaming pile of dung – I agree with you), Moneydance, iBank, Cha-Ching, Liquid Ledger, MoneyWell, … and several others. What I found was that, except for iBank and Moneydance, all excelled at one thing but were woefully inadequate for completing against Quicken for Windows. Moneydance was impressive.. boasting features that rival Quicken for W but I found the interface clunky and not, shall I say, Mac-esk? I ultimately decided to go with iBank because of its clean interface. I also decided that I could live without bill pay. I have since come to regret that decision. The most recent release, iBank4, shows that iggsoft is more interested in a flashy looking application than they are in making something that is efficient and stable. When looking for my personal finance solution of choice, I had also looked at several online solutions including Mint, Mvelopes, Yodlee, and others. I found that the online solutions were becoming pretty amazing but I still worried about security. Plus, Intuit had just purchased Mint and its future was cloudy. Since then they have continued to shore up several of the features that made me baulk at mint (lack of custom categories, not splitting, etc). I think the biggest thing for me was how I couldn’t upload my years of data.
So… I’m back at it again.. Finding a possible replacement for my personal finance software (this time iBank). This time I have decided to do a little more soul searching. Do I really need to track my history (beyond, say a year)? Do I really need 50+ categories? Why do I put myself through two hours+ per week to track every nickel and dime of my accounts?
I’m drawing a bit of a blank on this. I think that this software definitely plays to my OCD tendancies, but what I like about Mint is that it does not focus on my OCD. Instead it looks at the crucial money management problems: taxation, basic budgeting, bill paying, and “real-time” tracking and alerting. It’s goal is to save time. Still, I’m sure I’ll find myself hunkering down in front of iBank tracking every nickel and dime of my money. Is there any help for someone like me? 🙂
I liked your comments most of all. I wanted to know if I needed more than Mint to keep track of my day to day financial activities. It seems the other comments were more concerned with investing and customer service. I am OCD about reviews. Some of them were glowing and some were confusing and some were downright hostile. Do you think as a budgeting software Mint is adequate?
For just budgeting Mint.com is fine.
Brian, when reading your comment, I thought I wrote it. I haven’t ventured out and tried all the tools you have because I’m still limping along with the 2+ hours a week using Quicken and getting tired of the time spent. I recently switched to a Mac and run Quicken for Windows under VMWare, but can take a Mac app too. I’m just worried about tracking expenses. Are you still using Mint or iBank or ?
Long delayed response… Sorry. In 2015 I finally switched to Mint. I tried PersonalCapital as well but ultimately went with Mint. PersonalCapital’s cash flow chart almost won me over. I still think about it a lot. 🙂 Ultimately, I only really miss one thing about iBank: tracking paycheck deductions. I got over my other OCDs. The paycheck deductions can be calculated in Excel if I want but it is really nice to do EoY calculations for taxes and just see if I saved money on healthcare by going with insurance X vs Y. On a side note, since I moved to Mint, Intuit put Quicken up for sale. This seems odd to me given Quicken’s integration with TurboTax. I suspect they will do something for shore this up.
@InvestorJunkie – I too remember the early days of Quicken and it’s amazing how far personal finance software has come in the last couple of decades. What is equally amazing is how much further it needs to go in order to accommodate the varying levels of consumer needs. Mint was launched as a quick and easy budget tracking and categorization tool with a truly genius mechanism for categorizing expenses. This was the game changer as prior to Mint, the personal finance software space was relatively dead. Since then, they’ve bolted on some neat tools, but it remains, by and large, budgeting and tracking software.
As Mint continues to sign up new users at a rate in the tens of thousands each week, I think, as you point out, the trend toward web apps over desktop apps is here to stay. Certainly security is always a concern, but there’s no such thing as 100% secure. The best answer to the uncertainty of having accounts hacked is continual, regular monitoring – something that services like Quicken, Mint, and others make very easy and convenient.
You mentioned that you use Morningstar, and I assume this is the retail version available at Morningstar.com. If you’re looking for more advanced features, your best bet is to purchase their advisor workstation product that runs around $2,500 to $6,000/year. A big price tag, but the features are exponentially more robust (yes, account aggregation is available through non-consumer facing providers and seems to work better). Whether or not that kind of data will ever be free is hard to say, but I can tell you from conversations I’ve had with Morningstar that it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon as they control the lion’s share of that market and it would be extremely difficult to re-create their data and analytics.
Also, I’d like to ask you a question. Why do categories matter in budgeting? We’re working on our second version (1st one was a stinker) that we’ll release next month and are intentionally staying away from categories because we don’t see value in tracking them. Could you give some perspective on this?
Hi Michael,
Morningstar Advisor workstation? I’ll have to look into that. I was actually thinking a Bloomberg terminal.
Categories? For reporting and accuracy of budgeting. Especially that they are automatically done for you.
If you’re more into trading, the Bloomberg terminal is hard to beat. I would say Morningstar’s Advisor Workstation is more for reviewing and optimizing portfolios than for day-to-day trading. Either way, there is something to be said for paying significant sums for data and analytics once your portfolio reaches a certain size.
I was a big fan of Quicken Online. As I began the forced transition to Mint.com, I already noticed significant differences that I considered big failings. Mint.com’s screens allow NO customization (columns, views, etc.). QO was able to show you form the overall transaction screen what account each transaction was under–Mint.com only allows you to do this when you select account by account.
Mint.com also has a problem with duplications–I ended up with **5** different occurrences of my main checking account, completely throwing off my balances and requiring me to spend HOURS marking duplicate transactions. I am about to discontinue using because of this–my last transaction from my ORIGINAL instance of my primary checking account stopped getting updated over a MONTH ago.
Also, my 401(k) (via Hartford) and my Mellon ISD accounts lost the ability to log in via Mint and they are completely out of date. I have asked Mint support about these, but they have yet to fix. I understand this is a free service, but it has failed to be useful. Since I do not receive paper statements on any of my accounts, this means I now have to go back and make sure I have pdfs or downloads of all my transactions 🙁 I was hoping I could continue to use Mint to consolidate everything, but I can no longer rely on it.
Agreed Matt!! I have to double check every single transaction, there are so many duplicates! I don’t even know for sure half the time! Sometimes I will make multiple purchases of the same amount (say over the weekend, two coffees at 2.49) I have no way of knowing for sure if I end up looking back at it later on if they happen to clear on the same day. Beyond frustrating and it makes everything completely inaccurate. I asked customer service about the issue and all they did was instruct me on how to mark a transaction as duplicate. Thanks for nothing.
Does the iPhone version of mint sync with the desktop one?
Hi Susan, If you are referring to mint.com there is nothing to sync. The iphone gets it’s data from the web site. The web site gets it’s data from the banks. There is no desktop for the Macintosh is the same thing. Currently there is no Mint app for Windows. Everything sits within the cloud.
I agree with you that I prefer to take care of my own security. I think Quicken still stores your login information on its servers. I haven’t confirmed this though.
Hi John,
Its been said the most secure computer is turned off and locked in a safe.
In my business I deal with Internet security all the time. With that said I feel more secure with my data since I can deal with the ‘knowns’ and potential access points
With Mint (and any financial institution for that matter) there are many layers of unknowns. This isn’t saying Mint isn’t secure either. Using Quicken potentially has less access points. Though many unknowable users have compromised desktops and could be better off not keeping their data local.
tbh, mint.com is probably more than secure than 80% of users desktops. We are talking about a lot of liability here. You think Intuit acquired this company without putting a lot of money in the backend security??? It’s absurd to even suggest that. I work for a social-networking site of only around 2 million users, and you should see the amount of resources we put into security.
dP, it’s not the amount of time or money that’s the issue. A site is only as secure in it’s weakest link. As a security professional we have to be correct 100%, a hacker it only takes once.
Again this isn’t stating mint.com isn’t secure. I also use mint, though I would rather deal with knowns with my setup. With any cloud based solution it’s a black box to the end user. So you have no idea how much security (or not) is going into that service.
Keep in mind the many recent break-ins to Fortune 500 companies services. These companies also spent a lot of money on security. The RSA getting hacked is a good example.
I love mint.com. I use it daily. Although it was meant to be a budgeting tool, I used it to track my expenses and understand where my money goes. The flexibility to run pie charts for monthly, quarterly and yearly spending reports is awesome.
Another feature I like is to compare your spending with any city in the US it tracks. I learned my city has one of the higest drinking spending. No wonder we have so many drunk kids around here. LOL…
I recently installed the free iPhone version. It's alright, not great, but still useful.
It might be a decent program (remember, you get what you pay for) but their “customer service” is HORRIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! No phone number to call – just email, which is maddening! I have been waiting EIGHT days for the site to update my account with my credit union’s new URL link!! EIGHT DAYS to change the old URL to the new one!!! Meanwhile, nothing is being updated in my account and it’s VERY frustrating!!!!
Even MORE frustrating is that I keep getting the same auto-generated responses to my emails from ‘people’ like “Ahmad”, “Fariz”, “Febry” (are these even people???) every time I inquire about when the link will be updated . . . “Thank you so much for your email. We love hearing from you, whether you’re sharing a great testimonial or something we’d better fix. All of us are working really hard to make Mint better for you.” BLAH BLAH BLAH!!
So if you decide to use the program and spend many, many hours changing information to make it correct, just be prepared if something goes wrong because you will be waiting a VERY LONG TIME for the fix!!!!!
JB: absolutely correct. Their email responses are always the same pre-canned text, and maybe something “We understand your frustration and have forwarded your comments on to our web team blah blah blah”
This was even the case when I wrote to inform them (after a month of waiting for them to resolve an issue with my bank, which apparently was a result of Mint’s refusal to respond to a request from my bank for some documents involving information security and privacy) that I was closing my Mint account. Mint’s problems with my banks seemed to be increasing in frequency and duration (in my last months, it was usually 2 or 3 accounts down at a time), so I gave up on them and their nonexistent customer service.
I think they may have updated their support. I had a setup problem, emailed them and it was fixed in 12 hours. There were no instructions for me, they just fixed it. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I’m very happy with this free product.
Chuck may be right. Their tech support has been worse than awful, but I have read that they have hired some new and better trained people recently. And personally speaking, my last couple of interactions with them have been much better.
I asked a question through an email and was responded to promptly.
Mint Credit Monitor is a SCAM!! The security issue is just icing on the cake!
When I reviewed my scores with my lenders, the scores were way off. Lenders for cars and homes use different scoring models with the same credit bureau information. Mint Credit Monitor is actually affiliated now with TrustedID and Equifax.
My lenders, big and small, said that these sites were a waste of money. I appreciate their honesty – they do not need to tell me that.
When I told Mint Credit Monitor supervisors my concerns about the scoring model, they went immediately into Script Mode – Call Center speak for “we know that most people will have this problem, but we want to make money and screw the customer anyway! ”
It took me three tries and a supervisor just to get Mint Credit Monitor cancelled. Plus, I never got the refund, even though I requested it before the trial period ended. Not a company or group of companies that will get another penny from me.
Don’s waste your money or your time with Mint Credit Monitor. They do not care about your score. In the end, that is the worst security you can have.
MINT is good for what it does. It provides the user with a great overall view of personal finances. It is a big convenience to have all of your information on one easy to review site. MINT is not an investment tool or a budget planner-You have to do that for yourself or through some other professional adviser. Mint will only recap what you have done on your own and will provide warnings if you are screwing it all up but will not make you a better financial planner. You gotta do that yourself.
I totally disagree. Infrequently lose account and are unable to reconnect you with that account in other words they can no longer download or update anything in that account. This is been going on with my Chase account for months and months.Mint is I able to correct problems with my Chase account. This is an ongoing problem-months. Chase told me there is a simple fix if Mint would do it. I passed this along to their support team. No response, nada. Their support used to be good. Now it is the worst on the web. I have heard this problem over and over on the web. Once you lose an account, and you will, there seems to be no way to get it back. Beware!