I’ve talked before about my love of Excel charts. Yes, they are a rather low-tech system for budgeting and tracking our spending, but they’ve always worked for us.
And yet, everytime I’ve mentioned Excel, a number of you have commented or emailed me to sing the praises of your favorite budgeting software: Mint.com.
For the uninitiated, Mint.com is a FREE online budgeting system, which helps you to track spending, savings, debt repayment and more. In a nutshell, it makes managing your money a whole lot easier.
Now I will admit that I was resistant to try something new. After all, Excel was working for me. But with all the positive hype for Mint.com, I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.
So I signed up for a free account and spent an hour fooling around with it. I linked up to our debit and credit cards, our ING accounts, and our retirement funds.
At first, I wasn’t all that impressed. I thought, “Meh, my Excel charts are just as good. What do I need with this Mint.com?”
But then a few days later, I got a email from Mint.com, telling me that we had gone over budget in our housing category. (We hadn’t really gone over budget. I had just programmed in the dollar amount of our mortgage payment, not realizing that the cents would trigger an “over budget” warning.)
But the cool thing about this (somewhat pedantic) reminder was that without me even having to THINK about it, Mint was there, reminding us to get back on track.
Typically, my husband and I are quite careful about our spending. But occasionally we get our wires crossed and one of us will inadvertently overspend in a particular category.
Either we’re scrambling to make a mid-month budgetary change or, worse, we don’t even realize it until we come up short at the end of the month.
So with that friendly little reminder from Mint.com, I decided to take a second look. And the more I played with it, the more I liked it. Here are some of my favorites things:
- It’s visual – What can I say? I like those colorful charts and graphs! If you’re a visual learner like me, you will probably love it, too.
- It’s automated – Even when we get a little overwhelmed or disorganized, Mint.com keeps us focused and on track by automatically syncing up our financials without even having to be asked.
- It’s customizable – Short of directly importing our Excel chart, setting up the budget in Mint.com could not have been easier. I got to name all of my categories (and sub-categories) and then change them whenever I need.
- It’s exhaustive – We have a lot of accounts. A lot. It kind of makes me crazy, having to remember to check and update all of them all of the time. Enter Mint.com. From your checking (we have three) and savings to your credit cards to your investments for retirement and college, and even to your PayPal account, Mint.com can pull it all together and be your one-stop shop.
- It’s FREE – ‘Nuff said.
- It’s got bank – Named the best online personal finance tool by Money Magazine, Mint.com is bankrolled by Intuit, which also happens to be the founder of Quicken.
The one drawback? I’m still not sure how “secure” I feel about uploading all of my banking information. I know Mint.com has tons of security measures in place (and 1.5 million Americans seem to feel it’s secure), but even still.. I remain a bit apprehensive. That said, I did find this article from the NY Times, which was helpful to me in deciding to go forward.
If you’d like to give it a whirl, you sign up for Mint.com for free here.
Those are the plusses and minuses as I see it. But I’d love to hear from the other Mint.com users, too: What are your impressions of Mint – good or bad?
love love love Mint. I commented earlier about how I set up a tag in Mint for unplanned purchases ($10 of $10 purchase still generates $1.29 charge due to tax, etc.). So, I can still categorize appropriately, but in a blink I can see how much have I spent trying to “save money”.
I particularly love that i can turn the data over and around, without complicated Excel formulas… I can see exactly how much I’ve spent on groceries in the last 6 months, which was the highest/lowest month, what’s the average over those 6 months, and at which store I spent the most. I haven’t found a question that Mint can’t answer with the canned views/searches about our finances.
These two things combined, I’m hoping, will also help me determine what the difference in my spending/budget is since I started deal/couponing.
I can’t wait to hear how you’ve done with deal/couponing. That’s such a cool way to apply Mint.com to your financial life!
I love mint; we’ve been using it for about a year. What really attracted us to it in the first place is that we were using Quicken, but that can only be used on one computer. As we were budgeting together, but living apart (before getting married), it was nice for both of us to be able to look at the data when we needed to and not be tied to a single computer. Now that we’re married it’s still nice, because we still both mainly have our own computers, so we can each look at it when we need to, regardless of what the other is doing.
Good point on the Quicken thing. As a Mac user, Quicken for Macs is insanely expensive… and Mint.com of course is free! (which y’all know is my favorite price 😉
Jackie, were you able to transfer your Quicken data to mint.com? I’ve been using Quicken for years but am a little frustrated with the way it does some things. I’d like to try mint, but only if I can transfer all my data and categories.
I have been using Quicken for years and extensively use “tags”. For instance, I can enter transactions (multiple categories) for a house at 113 Bluebird and for a different house a 224 Rainbow. Then, I can run a report that combines all the houses, or a report just for the expenses at 113 Bluebird. Can I do this with mint.com? Thanks for your help.