Any experience with mint.com?

[Sfcmama]

Ok, so enough is enough and I'm on a mission to get our finances back under control. I know the first step is to take an inventory off all your expenses. (DH hasbeen in super denial so this is also important for our relationship.) I've seen ads and had others recommend using mint.com and am curious if anyone has experience with it? The homepage shows really cools charts and graphs which are appealing because DH responds well to visuals. I'm also thinking the alerts might help us stay more on top of everything.

Anyways, just curious if anyone has any feedback or tips about it? Tia!

[LifewithSage]

I've been using mint.com for over a year now.  I absolutely love it.  It was super easy to set up and I love that you can infinite budget categories and they're not all preset by the software.  It updates nicely and works very well for us.  It gives you nice trends in your spending and can help you with setting a budget.  I would highly recommend it.

[rightkindofme]

I'm up to almost 2 years of using it.  I really like it.  It encourages me to limit spending because I check it every day or so.

[Sonneva]

We were looking into mint.com. My husband is pretty careful with money stuff. The problem with mint.com is that you give them your passwords for your financial institutions thus voiding your agreement with your bank, credit card etc. (The stuff you sign with your financial institution says you agree not to give your passwords to anyone). So, if for some reason your bank account or credit card gets compromised, your financial institution wont cover your losses. Not worth the risk imho.

[Sfcmama]

Originally Posted by Sonneva 

We were looking into mint.com. My husband is pretty careful with money stuff. The problem with mint.com is that you give them your passwords for your financial institutions thus voiding your agreement with your bank, credit card etc. (The stuff you sign with your financial institution says you agree not to give your passwords to anyone). So, if for some reason your bank account or credit card gets compromised, your financial institution wont cover your losses. Not worth the risk imho.

Yikes! Good to know. Although, at this point, I think we are the largest threat to the security of our finances ;0)

Thanks for all the replies. I'm guessing its pretty obvious how to use all the tools? One of our challenges is that DH's income varies greatly - maybe this way we will be better able to track an average and budget accordingly...?

I'm going to try signing up today and see what we think.

[liberal_chick]

We tried to use it, but b/c our primary bank acct is with Bank of America it wouldn't work.  There is some sort of glitch with BOA accts and, even using their advice to try to fix it, it wouldn't work for us.  It looked really cool, we were bummed.

[LifewithSage]

they have fixed the BoA glitch.  My accounts with them work now.

Oh and we recently had fraud committed on our credit cards and our bank accounts.  There were several large sums of money removed from our bank accounts and fraudulent charges on our credit card.  Apparently my work computer had a really nasty phishing virus and since I logged into those accounts from work they were able to hack my accounts.  Anyways, none of my financial institutions batted an eye at covering our losses.  In fact, none of their fraud departments even asked me if I gave my passwords out to any services.  Anyways, that was my experience.

[liberal_chick]

Fixed them as of this week?  We tried last week and it wouldn't work so we tried again early this week and it was still a no-go.  I'm going to go check!  I totally hope we can make it work.

[Smithie]

I think Mint is plenty secure, but not very impressive in the features department. The budgeting tools in particular are weak - less flexible than what you can do with an Excel template you get for free of the Internet! My credit card was compromised last month (not by Mint), and Amex didn't even inquire as to whether I used Mint or another account aggregator. They just voided the charges and issued me a new card. 

My biggest single quibble with Mint is that you can't delete transactions - so if you want a fresh start tracking spending for 2011, tough luck, you are stuck with having transactions from the last 3 months of 2010 in your Mint interface. If they ever fix this issue, they might get me to use it. I really do want online access to my financial profile from anywhere. 

If you are serious about become spending-savvy, OP, I think Quicken desktop is the best tool right now. It's worth the money you spend on it for the ease of use and the robust budgeting tools and the chart graphy goodness of it all. 

[chely7425]

I love Quicken :) Right now we are in debt pay-off mode so I am using Quicken plus an Excel spread sheet I made because it helps my brain not hurt, but once we have fewer bills I plan on going to just using Quicken!

[OnEarth]

Originally Posted by Smithie 

My biggest single quibble with Mint is that you can't delete transactions - so if you want a fresh start tracking spending for 2011, tough luck, you are stuck with having transactions from the last 3 months of 2010 in your Mint interface. If they ever fix this issue, they might get me to use it. I really do want online access to my financial profile from anywhere. 

You can actually do this by selecting "exclude from mint" in the category section. You can even edit multiple transactions, so you don't have to do it individually. For instance, I don't like credit card interest to be included in my budgeting so I set it up so that they're excluded from mint.

I like mint, but I have never used quicken. One thing that really annoys me is that once the month is over you can't go back and change the budget settings for the month, although you can recategorize transactions so they fall in different budget categories. Also, you can only look at "this year, this month, or all time" for overall expenditures, I'd like to be able to look at last 3 months, or last 12 months, all together. BUT overall I'm happy with it, I find it especially useful because we have a lot of accounts and this way I don't have to check into every single one of them online, and I can use the information if need be to do a more detailed excel spread sheet.

[orangecanoe]

I've recently started using it again and noticed that they have remedied some of the glitches that made it frustrating---listing transactions twice for one. My fave feature recently is the ablity to 'split' a transaction into two categories after the transaction has cleared. I generally find I save money by buying health and beauty and household items at the grocery store, but still like knowing what my grocery/household totals are.

The iphone app isn't as robust as I wish it was. On a suggestion from a blogger, I tried the Money Engine app for tracking expenses that aren't fixed amounts in the budget (eating out, gas, etc)

[Smithie]

I gave that "exclude from Mint" feature a try-on-for-size, and it does improve my experience quite a bit. Thanks for the tip!

[Sfcmama]

Op here.
Thanks for the additional replies. I started an account today and have been adding all our info. I really like the cc due dates and amounts easily accessible instead of signing into each one separately. Can quicken do that?

I haven't experimented with any of the tools other than setting alerts but creating a budget is my next task. It really is sobering to see it all in one place but a lot harder to live in denial!

[rightkindofme]

If in the budgeting section you want to make a transaction from a previous month no longer effect the current month you can go to Budget, click on "Edit Details" on the category.  The only way a previous event should still be reflected on the current month is if you have "Make this budget rollover" checked.  In subscript there should be a place to hit, "Reset this balance to 0". 

:)

[chaoticzenmom]

I use a 0 balance budget excel template and my husband uses Mint to see if we've accomplished our 0 balance and to help set goals.  He loves it.  I prefer my excel spreadsheet.  I have a blank one that I keep to give to people. I'd be happy to send if you haven't seen one.  It's pretty self-explanatory.  It took us about 6 months to get everything in there and correct.  We also use a snowball calculator to help us with our snowball accounts.  Here's the link to that. 

http://www.vertex42.com/Calculators/debt-reduction-calculator.html