Can Mint.com solve one of my personal finance goals for 2009? I’m a little late with one of my goals for 2008, so it’s now become my new 2009 goal. Finding a free or relatively inexpensive software program to track personal finance transactions and establish a budget for my wife and I. Since transparency seems to be the catch phrase of 2009 with banks and financial institutions, I thought it would be important to focus on this same issue with family finances. I seem to be the keeper of passwords, bank accounts, and financial records, so it was important to find a way to share this info efficiently with my wife. It also helps that she has an iphone for work and has access to one of the coolest applications ever.
Yes, Mint.com has an application for the iphone that allows you to see your daily net worth and track your spending plans. It’s actually killing me that I don’t have an iphone right now, so I’m trying hard to justify why I need one. One word, I don’t. Can I afford $70 a month for cell service? Yes. Should I spend $70 on cell service? Nope. When can I purchase an iphone? When I create another stream of passive income that nets at least $70 a month.
Time to put the iphone out of my mind for now. Mint.com has the ability to track all of your bank accounts, investment accounts, credit cards, car loans and more. I was even surprised to see my paypal account and Prosper.com account could be linked to Mint. The most powerful part is the ability to track daily transactions through credit cards and bank accounts. Mint will even give you suggestions for saving additional money on credit card offers or higher interest rates through savings accounts. This is how Mint makes money on this service, and it’s an option that you don’t have to accept. I’m perfectly happy with one of my banks, but I could choose to open an HSBC account and earn slightly higher interest. Is it worth jumping from bank to bank, chasing higher interest rates? It could be.
I did have one major issue when trying to link my ING Orange account with Mint. I kept receiving an error message that an invalid username or password were used. I finally reset my 5 personal questions on ING, answered them, then saved. In a separate web browser I answered the same 5 questions on Mint in the same order and pressed enter. Success, finally the ING Orange account was linked to Mint.
I’m still working on establishing a budget through Mint and creating user defined categories for transactions. Many of the categories I had on my Excel spreadsheet can be utilized on Mint. Easy to create custom categories for things like 529 savings plan or Preschool tuition.
What do I wish Mint had? More reports for financial planning. Reports that showed future growth of savings at current interest rates or growth of my retirement account. I realize this can be done on other investment sites as well, but would be nice to have in one place.
What’s the best feature of Mint? The fact that my wife and I can have access to the same personal finance information in real time is amazing. Total transparency and the ability to have access to this information quickly is priceless. Many hours I have spent trying to manually update our budget spreadsheet and transactions are now available for more family time.
Have you used Mint or another personal finance software for your family budget?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I love mint.com… except that it does not allow you to track cash. I’ve been trying to control grocery spending by using cash only- if I only have $50 in my pocket, I can only SPEND $50, right?
I started using clearcheckbook.com to track everything instead. The downside is that clearcheckbook.com is not connected to my accounts and does not update automatically. The plus side is that I can track cash spending, gift card purchases, etc.
If you have any solutions to the mint/cash issue, I would love to hear them.
@ Alison
Mint is wonderful, and yes I do track cash on Mint but I do have to get a little creative. What I do is change the ATM cash category to the corresponding purchase. It’s can be difficult to track $50 if you spent $30 at the grocery store and $20 at the movies. I tend to use cash very sparingly and use my atm debit card for most purchases. Using cash can be a great way to spend less and the only way I can think to use mint is to do several $20 transactions and go back and adjust the category by using your receipts. Kind of a pain to workaround, but it can work.
i love mint.com!!!
It is a truly freeing, real time budget system for us. Love it.
I just signed up for an ING account and heard that mint.com and ING are not friends
I hope it is resolved as mint.com puts everything in one place for me.
Hope so!