Mint: Worry Free Money Management
February 13, 2008 | 1 Comment
You could say I’m slightly obsessed with my finances. Some of the habits I have developed are pretty good; I check my bank account at least once a day, which might sound a bit obsessive but it helped to spot fraudulent charges a few years back. However when it comes to balancing the checkbook, or even tracking where my money goes, I’m not really where I should be.
My poor money management isn’t exactly for lack of trying though. In high school, back in my Windows days, I ran Microsoft Money religiously. But then came college and multiple bank accounts and credit cards. It just became a bit too much work. When I started my Mac days I tried some of the third-party Mac apps designed to manage your money like iBank and most recently Cha-Ching.
Cha-Ching is a very simple program that did almost everything I could ask for in a money managment application: it simply and graphically showed where my money was going, tagged transactions so that I could easily find related expenses, and simply showed when spending in certain categories went over pre-set budgets. I enjoyed using the application but my love affair only lasted a few days. Cha-Ching was missing one thing: the ability to get new transaction information from my bank without me having to input it by hand. I’m lazy, what can I say.
A few days ago, while looking for a web app that shares the same name, I stumbled on Mint and found the solution to all my horrible money management woes. Mint is essentially a web-based version of Cha-Ching (though they of course are not related) but Mint connects to my bank’s web site nightly and downloads all of the new transactions, keeping everything up to date. Great right? It even goes a step further and automatically tags all the transactions based on Mint’s database. For example, whenever Mint sees Publix in one of my accounts it knows that that is a groceries purchase. Needless to say Mint had me sold in minutes.
Sold is just a word of course because Mint is a free service. I presume they get their funding from all the major banks and investment firms as Mint’s “advertisements” comes in the form of suggestions on how to save money. For example I could earn another $346 a year if I switch my savings account to E*TRADE which offers a better rate.
Bank of America has a similar concept to Mint in their Portfolio service which comes with Online Banking though the difference is that Mint is user-friendly and fun to use. For each transaction I make I can see how much I’ve spent at that place in the past, if that purchase has put me over budget for the month, and how much people spend (on average) at that place across the country. I presume that Mint’s users are more tech-savy then your typical American as the average monthly spending at iTunes, according to Mint, is around $25 a person. This, of course, made me feel pretty good considering I was below the national average despite a music-loving clicking-finger.
Another thing that Mint does is notify me should my accounts have suspicious activity on them. This, of course, is no big deal as all online banking services offer this, but Mint’s alerts can be sent via send text messages as well. Considering my phone is always with me, it’s good to know I’ll know immediately if something is awry.
I was concerned about security for about a half a second, after all I’m plugging my online banking usernames and passwords to a third party website to be stored in their database. Mint seems to elevate this fear by having just about every verification system on the internet covering them, including VeriSign, which is good enough for me. Bank of America also just added a new password requirement to make online transfers, so even if Mint’s database is compromised my accounts are still safe. Worry free money management, there is nothing better!
I think my poor money management days might be a thing of the past considering Mint is a fool proof way to see where my money is going. Now the only thing that could stop me from keeping tabs on my money is forgetting my Mint password… which is 14 characters long!