Mint.com or other software?

[VisionaryMom]

Do you use Mint.com? I looked at it, but I'm not sure what I think.

I want to get better at tracking our money into many categories so that we can see exactly where we're spending. DH can get MS Money for free through a subscription he has, but he mentioned reading that Quicken was better in a lot of ways. Thoughts?

[cymbeline]

I used Quicken for 12 years. Loved it. Never liked Money. It was slow to load and crashed a few times, losing all my info.

That said, I switched to Mint about a month ago. It isn't perfect, but we switched for two main reasons:

1. I can access all my info from my Android phone (has a great iPhone app too) and so can DH -- which is nice because before he was kind of clueless, Quicken was on my computer and I had to print out reports for him which weren't up to the minute. His car broke down, he checked Mint on his Hero, and he was able to say, yes we have enough money budgeted for the repair. V v cool!

2. I like the budgeting features. It sends alerts to my Gmail account when we go over or are about to go over. V helpful.

What I would change:

1. It is free, so they advertise to you. Since we're debt free and don't do credit cards, it is constantly trying to suggest "ways to save" which are really just credit card scams to get you so-called "free money." Yeah right.

2. It doesn't automatically access all of our accounts, so I have to do some stuff manually (like our mortgage). But I am guessing this will change over time as it becomes more popular. I'm hoping there will also be an ad-free subscription version. I'd be willing to pay $5-10/mo for the service as long as it is robust and stable.

[smokeylo]

I like Mint because it helps me see where my money is going. It has helped me figure out where we need to cut back, and forced me to look at some silly stuff we were still paying for that we weren't using. That being said, once we create a budget, I will likely track it using Pear Budget because Pear allows you to predetermine where $ goes in categories, rather than retroactively categorizing things, if that makes sense. I will probably use them BOTH for awhile, but ultimately once we're on a zero-based budget and using more cash, Mint won't be as useful I don't think.