Website Review: Mint.com

April 5, 2008 By Debbie Dragon

I have read finance related articles on Mint.com in the past, but never really took the time to realize that they are more than another site with articles!  This morning I was looking around for some inspiration, and discovered that Mint.com allows people to create an account and track all of their bank accounts and credit cards.  I purchased Quicken this year for around $90 to do this… and it seems Mint.com offers a comparable service for free?  Is that possible? 

I decided to create an account so I could see how it works and exactly what it would do.  I also figured if there was a charge to be made for the service I would definitely discover it when signing up.

So after creating an account (took less than a minute), I found I could add my checking, credit cards, savings and brokerage accounts to the system.  Immediately, I decided to add Paypal, because the primary reason I bought the latest version of Quicken this year was because it had Paypal support - supposedly it would download my transactions from paypal and update my records in Quicken like it does bank accounts.  It never worked for me, despite numerous customer support calls and emails.  I tried making it worke very day for 2 months actually, and still receive customer support emails that tell me to inactivate/activate the account and see if it works now!  Anyway, I decide to put Mint.com to the test and enter my Paypal account first.

Within a few seconds, Mint had connected to my Paypal account, downloaded transactions and displayed an accurate balance.  Amazingly enough, the transaction section knew how to deal with all the repeat entries Paypal generally includes (a pending entry, invoice entry, and actual money-changing-hands-entry).

On a variety of tabs, I was able to see how I was spending the money in my account, received suggested ways to save more, a pie chart and a listing that showed me what I was doing with the money in this account at a glance.   It took me less than 5 minutes to discover all of this with the one account I entered, and I can’t wait to enter all of my other bank accounts.

If you are looking to take better control of your financial situation, I think you’ll want to try out your Mint.com account.  I’m sincerely impressed, and from what I can tell- this rivals the Quicken software… and it was completely free.

Posted in budgeting, credit cards, financial planners, financial plans, investing, miscellaneous, personal behavior, personal finance