Managing Your Money With Mint
Sep 18th, 07 | 5 remarksToday was the official release of Mint’s new online personal finance management system, and I’m happy to see it finally go live. I’ve been a beta tester for a few weeks, but as such was prohibited from blogging about it until now. ;)
Mint has designed a beautiful and efficient interface for managing your finances - and it’s totally free. With Mint, you can monitor multiple accounts, visually track your spending habits, and even discover ways to save money.
I’ll admit I was a little skittish about letting any one company pull data in from all my other banking institutions, but a quick read through their security/privacy policy set my mind at ease. These guys mean business when it comes to protecting your information.
Right out of the gate they have over 3500 institutions available. Finding and adding one to your accounts panel is as simple as selecting your bank (or credit card company) and entering your user name and password.
Various graphs and charts make it very easy to see what’s going on with your money. The Spending Trends panel in particular shows you exactly where your money is going (i.e. groceries, gas, restaurants). If you’re not the best budgeter, and perhaps always wondering why you’re short on cash at the end of the moth, this will be a great service for you. :)
While the web service is not exceptionally fast (that could be due to a heavy load on the servers today), their customer service is. My personal bank was not listed among the financial institutions supported, so I applied to have it added. No luck yet, but they did come back with a response right away to let me know they’re working on it. Not bad considering they’ve received about 3,000 emails just in the past few weeks.
Other Mint features include customized SMS or Email alerts for account activity, and personalized recommendations on how you can save money based on your spending patterns.
On a side note, their decisions on branding don’t seem to be real solid yet, which could be a little confusing for some. They have a great logo in place, but the home site, blog, and personalized account pages all sport a slightly different color scheme and design.
That said, obviously creating a feature-rich and reliable web service is the priority for the Mint team, and I think they’re on the right track. I just can’t believe the service is free!
Have you seen our Electric CheckBook entry for RailsRumble07? It was completely designed and built by our 3-man team during the 48-hour Rails competition.
ElectricCheckBook - http://electriccheckbook.com
RailsRumble07 - http://vote.railsrumble.com
Its flexible double-entry ledgers can be shared within a group enabling remote partners, your accountant and spouse to share access to the appropriate accounts without emailing files back and forth.
Mint is obviously a bit more mature, but ours was designed, developed and launched in 48 hours. It has already replaced Quickbooks for our small distributed team and handles our accounting, project budgeting, and contractor timesheets. We’ll continue to add features that we need to manage our personal and business finances.
Sep 19, 07 | 11:52 amHmm…sounds interesting, will certainly check this out. I have only used software such as Microsoft Money so far since I wasn’t sure if I wanted to upload my financial details online. The Security/Privacy section does seem comprehensive though.
Sep 19, 07 | 10:42 pmLove this new concept. We always try to take a look at our budget on a quarterly basis and this would be helpful……..thanks for sharing.
Jun 1, 08 | 1:45 pmSome time ago I saw this release and as a designer I like the interface of this system.
Jul 5, 08 | 5:58 amNice colors, a lot of whitespace, good usability.
Can anybody comment the functionality of Mint ?
Money managing is absolutely no problem since I found out the no fee balance transfers service. It can do miracles for you financial life. Give it a try !
Jul 31, 08 | 5:09 am