A year of using Mint

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 13 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

After using Microsoft Money for almost 14 years, last January I started using mint.com to keep track of our personal finances. I wasn’t looking to move my money management into the cloud but was forced to when Microsoft decided to discontinue the online banking portion of Money in February 2010. That pretty much forced me to look for alternatives and after trying out a few, I settled on Mint. It’s been a year … how has it been?

I began 2010 with serious MS Money withdrawal: I stopped using it cold turkey on December 31, 2009 and started Minty fresh on January 1. Some of the things that I could no longer do included:

  • manually create custom accounts
  • manually enter transactions
  • split paychecks (taxes, insurance, 401k, deductions, etc.)
  • pay bills
  • track loyalty programs like credit card reward points

In fact, except for manually entering transactions, I still can’t do any of that stuff with Mint. The custom account thing is less important now since some of my accounts that weren’t supported back when I switched (like UPromise) have since been added. To pay bills online or transfer funds I have to log into my banking web sites (except for recording manual transactions, Mint is “read only”). The lack of being able to accurately track payroll deductions is still one of the biggest problems I have with Mint. It also took me some time to adjust to their default transaction categories. You can add your own custom sub-categories but can’t change (or add to) the high-level ones.

There were some positives to my initial experience, however. Mint is completely web-based, and also has mobile apps for the iPhone and Android devices, so I’m able to access it “anywhere” instead of just from my PC at home where MS Money was installed locally. The reporting and budgeting seemed a little easier to use as well and it was cool to be able to set SMS or e-mail alerts for certain thresholds (large transactions, upcoming bills, etc.). Payee names for downloaded transactions come across like they would on your bank or credit card statement, but you can create basic rules to rename them to more standard names (and also categorize them the way you want instead of Mint’s “guess”).

But is it safe? As with other online consolidation services (like Yodlee, or even Facebook) where you’re giving a third-party your login credentials for other sites, you need to trust them. Read the privacy and security policies closely and decide for yourself if the convenience of the service is worth the risk. I personally haven’t had any problems with Mint in the past year. Yes, if someone was able to hack into my account they could get a great deal of information about me and my financial accounts but they couldn’t actually do anything from Mint, like transferring funds. In fact, they couldn’t even get my account numbers since those don’t appear in Mint once you link those financial accounts (they only appear by name). Still, it’s a tempting honeypot for hackers who might want one-stop-shopping access to a large swath of your financial information, so be careful and alert.

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