Last month, I signed up for Mint.com. I have to admit, at first I was a little scared to sign up. You have to give it all the usernames and passwords of your financial accounts for it to be of any use. I was a little wary about doing that, so I did some research first. After seeing it being praised by TechCrunch, NY Times, and Washington Post, I felt a little better about it and took the plunge.
I gave Mint.com access to both my checking accounts, my savings account, my 401k, my account with a stock brokerage, two of my credit card accounts, and the knowledge that I currently haven't taken any loans. Boy, I'm glad I did.
Mint.com has been tremendously useful in tracking my finances. I can set-up warning when a transaction above a certain amount has occurred. It takes all my spendings across all my accounts and puts them into categories. It uses historical data to tell me how much I normally spend in a category, and how much I've spent so far this month. It was able to look up data from months before, so I was immediately able to take advantage of the historical trends from the first date I signed up. It depressingly shows how much debt I have compared to how much cash on hand I have (or depressing at least in my own scenario). I get weekly financial summaries that also help update me on my spendings even if I don't log onto their site.
In my month of using it, I have found Mint.com already to be a great tool to help me watch my money carefully. At once glance, I can see how much cash I have, how much debt I've accumulated, and how my investments are doing.
I admit, it seems very risky to give one site all the login information for all your financial accounts. If you don't feel up to taking the risk, then by all means, don't. But if you trust the Washington Post and the New York Times enough to take their word as I have, I'm sure you'll find Mint.com to be an amazing tool to help watch your finances.
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Organizing Your Finances with Mint.com
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6 comments:
I've been trying to use Mint.com, mostly because I'm meeting with my financial adviser next week and I *really* need to know how much I've been spending and on what - this seemed like the perfect solution! Unfortunately, no matter what I do, it won't let me add any PNC bank accounts, so it looks like I'm SOL. It's incredibly frustrating. :(
=( It took some time for some of my accounts to log in for the first time, but they all eventually ended up logging in fine. I'm sorry it doesn't work for you. I would highly suggest contacting their customer support on this issue, since this should definitely work and I'm sure they'll help you figure out what's wrong.
Yeah, I contact them, but based on the support forums I might not be the only one with the issue.
When you say it took a while, did you get the "We're having issues right now" message, or something else?
I've been trying for two days and nothing is changing. Bleh.
I got a variety of messages, all of them which told me to try again later and maybe it would work. I had to try a bunch of times over 24 hours, but eventually I got through and after the first time, it seemed to connect easier the rest of the times (my ING one still sometimes takes a while to update, but it definitely goes through now).
Have you seen this post: http://forums.mint.com/showthread.php?t=2540? I don't know if it's helpful or not though, as I no longer have a PNC account so I can't test it myself
Yeah, I saw that, but I was definitely adding the right kind of account, and I don't have a credit card so the second post doesn't apply. I guess I'll just wait to see if they reply to me.
Who knows where to download XRumer 5.0 Palladium?
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!
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