Does anyone here use mint.com to track their personal finances. I've looked at their services briefly and I've been impressed with what I've seen so far. Does anyone else out there have any opinions or experences?

http://www.mint.com

5/6/2008 12:42:33 AM

i use yodlee.com - i believe mint uses them on the backend of things

its pretty nice, i can finally see how much bullshit i spend a month on things i don't need

security is something to worry about from the standpoint that all your online finance accounts are in one place, but they are pretty heavy on protecting that info

bank of america and others use yodlee.com on the backend too

5/6/2008 3:02:48 AM

whoa, just signed up for this

it's cool as shit

Quote :

"i can finally see how much bullshit i spend a month on things i don't need"

this is my favorite feature so far

and it even links with SECU! wowwwww!

5/6/2008 5:08:34 AM

yeah thanks for sharing. I setup Money, but I always put all of my assets and debt into it so it's hard to really manage my month-to-month finances. This seems perfect.

5/6/2008 8:22:16 AM

Ars Technica did a mini-review of it last week
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080430-mint-com-to-add-investment-tracking-still-not-a-manager.html
bottom line - it's not a replacement for MS Money or Quicken yet, but it's better than nothing for people who don't already use financial management software, or it's good as a supplement.

5/6/2008 8:47:15 AM

excel ftw

5/6/2008 8:49:15 AM

can you only add four accounts?

5/6/2008 10:13:39 AM

I just made my account, pretty nifty. Definitely good if you don't keep track of shit like me

5/6/2008 11:36:06 AM

With first citizens you have to pay to integrate it with MS money, i like how this uses a different method of logging in and retrieving the data.

5/6/2008 11:38:20 AM

I setup a mint account about a month ago and decided I didn't like it when it told me how much money I was wasting on eating out for lunch at work

5/6/2008 11:41:43 AM

Quote :

"persinal"

5/6/2008 11:42:51 AM

i'm not having good first impressions with it
1) using FireFox 3b5, the links where you click the banks, or typing in a bank name to search didn't work
2) then using IE6 the pop-up layer to add banks just didn't show up
so I had to go back to FireFox 2 to even get the website working at all

now I'm having a hell of a time adding my banks and CCs. The Citibank credit card, for example, is asking me about a dozen of the "what street did you grow up on" questions, and i keep failing authentication, but it won't tell me what is wrong - if it's my password or the questions, or which question or what. Had the same problem with my First Citizens account - I had to answer 3 questions, but each question had a drop-down of about 15 questions to choose from. I had to log into my first citizens account just to see which questions I had provided them with, then pick those questions back in mint.
so.... overall, looks promising, but to many up-front headaches right now....

5/6/2008 11:50:57 AM

^^ I've claimed to be good at a lot of things. Typing was never one of them.

5/6/2008 12:07:12 PM

before we all log in and register


how is this better than quicken or MS Money?

5/6/2008 12:08:11 PM

i think it's a little less hassle than MS Money.
I've use Money religiously for 6 years, but it's still not totally idiot-proof for linking accounts up online or for creating easy to use and easy to see graphs or charts.

Mint has some really nice interactive graphs right out of the box that are created automatically. MS Money still requires a good bit of coaxing for expense and income categorization and creating nice budgets and graphs.

If you already use Quicken or Money to track everything, I would consider Mint a nice supplement, but not essential. If you don't do any tracking at all, then I think mint is a great way to get started in tracking your expenses and budget

5/6/2008 12:14:43 PM

^^^ Yeah I locked myself out of FC, but during the process I was eventually asked all three of my questions so once I got past that it was fine.

IETab worked for me. My gripe is that I have two bank accounts and two CC and want to track paypal as well. I can't figure out if it's limited to 4 accounts or just that four are showing on the front page.

oh, definitely not a 4 account limit. I didn't see it adds more blocks as you fill them up

[Edited on May 6, 2008 at 12:29 PM. Reason : .]

5/6/2008 12:14:53 PM

^^^ It isn't. The selling point is that it's practically effortless.

[Edited on May 6, 2008 at 12:15 PM. Reason : not enough ^s]

5/6/2008 12:15:35 PM

nice find! I just signed up. Can't wait until they add mortgage support.

5/6/2008 12:57:58 PM

I've been using mint since October and I LOVE it.

I'm a very visual person so seeing the graphs of how much I've spent and where has really helped me cut down on random spending (Target, Woot and Zappos). I can also see how much money I'm saving/earning in my ING account and that really helps me put more money in that than I might have before.

5/6/2008 2:45:58 PM

the only thing I don't like about it is that the budget doesn't separate spending between actual money and credit cards. I like to keep my actual bank account budget separate and subtract credit card payments from that.

that and a couple of my cards won't sign in.

5/6/2008 3:24:50 PM

sweet

i sign up and they dont have rbc on their bank database

5/6/2008 5:37:09 PM

try centura

5/6/2008 5:45:52 PM

ballsacks

i'm a retard

carry on

5/6/2008 5:47:27 PM

i tried it a few months ago hoping i'd be able to replace quicken with it

nope

it's better than nothing but not as good as money or quicken, which is surprising since both are shitty products

5/6/2008 8:05:46 PM

I played with this for a while today, and it's really improved since the site first started.

It seems like a great tool for those who just want to keep an idea of what their balances are on all their accounts without having to login to each respective institution's website. The trends and graphs look nice, but many of the default ones for me were off due to miscategorization of the transactions it downloaded from my accounts. To be real useful, one would have to go in and make sure payees and categories are correct. For someone like me who has used Quicken/Money since 1998, I don't want to take the time to maintain a separate list of payees and categories.

Mint is far better than Quicken Online, which I tried out of curiosity for all of 30 minutes last month.

5/6/2008 10:35:36 PM

Quote :

"Is there a way via script or addon/extension to save let's say 5 sites that all require login. Have a one click/trigger/macro to open them all and login? Or at least open them all at once in different tabs ?"

from FF thread. This def. saves me a lot of hassle.

5/6/2008 10:40:07 PM

I wish it would show time series of balances so I could see how my money grows or diminishes over time.

5/7/2008 12:58:52 PM

check out yodlee.com
they have graphs of your total net worth over time, amount spent in each category over time, deposits and withdrawls over time, income vs expenses, etc

it also has a budgeting tool too, i havn't used mint but i know yodlee has a lot of features

5/7/2008 4:42:49 PM

^ mint works with yodlee to get it's data. I expect to see the features from one soon come to the other.

[Edited on May 7, 2008 at 4:52 PM. Reason : typing FTL]

5/7/2008 4:50:56 PM

I like it, but I wish it picked up all of my old credit card statements, so I could see a longer trend of my spending.

5/7/2008 8:54:15 PM

yeah, that surprised me that it only picked up a days worth of my bank account and didn't mine for as much past data as it could...

5/7/2008 9:04:08 PM

i agree with ^, ^^

5/7/2008 9:07:34 PM

is no one concerned about the safety of this kind of shit?

5/7/2008 9:12:03 PM

I thought about it, for like...a split second.

5/7/2008 9:14:55 PM

i cant add my first citizens credit card...

5/7/2008 9:19:54 PM

search First Citizens Bank, then select First Citizens Bank (NC) Credit Card...
or are you having trouble authenticating? (i.e. wrong answers to security questions or bad user id or password?)

5/7/2008 9:25:33 PM

so i selected that, and it asked just for user and password, but it fails at authentication and suggests i try another bank

i got the plain old First Citizens account to work...that just shows my checking account

[Edited on May 7, 2008 at 9:28 PM. Reason : ]

5/7/2008 9:27:39 PM

maybe send mint.com a quick email? i had trouble with FC checking account when I set mine up, but finally got it to work after 3 tries.

5/7/2008 9:30:10 PM

ah fuck it. not worth the hassle. especially since it won't look back at all my spending earlier than this month.

"YOUR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED"

sweet, i feel safe now

5/7/2008 9:33:29 PM

anyone having trouble setting up their mobile alerts? I've put in my phone number and clicked send then re-send a dozen times from 3 different browsers and i still haven't gotten my txt message confirmation yet. this is over 3 days now.

I've also discovered that a lot of mint.com doesn't work in FF3 so i've had to use Safari 3 and FF2

5/7/2008 9:56:51 PM

Quote :

"now I'm having a hell of a time adding my banks and CCs. The Citibank credit card, for example, is asking me about a dozen of the "what street did you grow up on" questions, and i keep failing authentication, but it won't tell me what is wrong - if it's my password or the questions, or which question or what. Had the same problem with my First Citizens account - I had to answer 3 questions, but each question had a drop-down of about 15 questions to choose from. I had to log into my first citizens account just to see which questions I had provided them with, then pick those questions back in mint."

My Citi account did this too, but I couldn't remember which questions I used, so I just left all the answers blank and just put in my username and password, and it authenticated just fine. So much for the security questions.

5/7/2008 10:10:13 PM

Quote :

"it won't look back at all my spending earlier than this month."

Oh fuck this. Glad I didn't waste my time setting it up.

5/7/2008 10:33:25 PM

david.

that's just b/c when initially getting the information it can only parse as far back as your online transactions are immediately available on the website

it's not like it stops going forward though

5/7/2008 10:38:15 PM

Wait, so if my online transactions go back 4 months, it will get those 4 months?

5/7/2008 11:27:51 PM

I don't know what you guys are talking about but all my transactions on all my accounts are on mint.com and I just signed up 2 days ago.

5/7/2008 11:35:01 PM

^^ yes, Mine will show me spending trends back to december.

It doesn't show your "budget" except for the current month, but you can view your "trends"

5/8/2008 12:36:45 PM

the mobile alerts dont work for me either. It wont send to my cell phone

5/8/2008 1:38:35 PM

^who's your carrier?

I have AT&T with an iPhone.

5/8/2008 2:40:37 PM

I have ATT as well

5/8/2008 4:43:58 PM

does anyone have a credit card through First Citizens and has gotten mint to work??

5/11/2008 11:19:24 PM