About a month ago, my wife and I were noticing that our number of accounts at various financial institutions was becoming a bit unwieldy. We had:
- A 401k at one place
- An IRA at another
- Checking accounts at two different places (one personal, one business)
- Two savings accounts (one personal, one business) at the same institution as each other, but at a different institution than any of the other accounts.
- A credit card with yet another financial institution
- Student loans with yet one more institution.
Yikes! The thing is, they all made sense for various reasons, and to try to move them all to one place would have meant sacrificing something worthwhile (whether rate of return with the savings, a great cashback rewards plan with the credit card, or very convenient locations with the bank).
Enter mint.com. With a (free) account at mint we can now look at all of our info in one place.
Mint automatically pulls information from all of our different accounts, so there’s no need for us to update anything manually. (My previous system was to keep it all in a manually-updated spreadsheet. It got to be a bit of a pain in the neck!)
So that’s why we created an account. And it completely solved the problem. After having an account for a while though, I realized something else it does for us:
It tracks spending very nicely.
For anybody who tracks their spending, Mint is absolutely awesome. It automatically tallies up how much you spend each month with every individual vendor. What I find more useful, however, is the way that it groups vendors to give us information as to how much we’re spending in various categories.
Then it gives us nice, pretty charts. Like this:
What’s more helpful for me, however, is the ability to look at trends over time. For example, we can look at changes in our monthly grocery expenditures:
(The November number is artificially low because it only includes data for a portion of the month.)
One thing I’d advise, however, is checking how mint categorizes each of the vendors with which you spend money. It gets most of them right, but probably 1/15 categorizations will be completely incorrect. (For example, it placed our dental insurance payment in the “entertainment: sports” category.) Luckily, changing the categorization of a vendor (or creating entirely new spending categories) is quite easy.
Security concerns?
I’ve heard a few people voice concerns about security with online systems like this. Rather than try to answer them myself, I’ll just point you to this video from the CEO of mint. (It covered all the concerns I had, as well as some others.)
In short
- Mint lets me see all our accounts in one place.
- Mint tracks our spending for us, making it easy to spot trends.
- It’s costs me nothing, and they don’t send me any spam.
Just thought I’d share my thoughts on it, as it’s been quite helpful for us. I hope you find it as helpful as I do. 
Hi Mike, Really glad to hear that you’re finding mint.com to be helpful in managing your finances. Look out for some features just launched this week, including new and improved ways to find a better credit card or bank account for your individual needs. Love to get your feedback on these new features, anytime. Donna@mint.com
Donna: Thanks for stopping by and commenting. It’s refreshing to see a company that is actually listening to (and acting upon) what its customers have to say!
Tommy: I agree, it would be nice to be able to pay bills all in one place.
I also recently started using Mint. I spent a decent amount of time setting up my accounts, thinking this would be a great way to pay all of my bills from one place (my banks online banking sucks), but then realized that feature isn’t supported. The spending tracking alone definitely makes it worth using though. I’m pretty amazed that it’s free, considering how useful it is.
I use a large credit union, and it is still not added. I’ve consolidated most of my finances there: checking/savings, credit card, car loan, and mortgage. So for me to use mint, it leaves out quite a bit of my financial picture.
Please add more institutions Mint, and please look at credit unions. I’m at the 7th largest CU in the USA and it is not supported (http://www.alliantcreditunion.org/)
I did a post on Mint too. I love their service – keeps everything nice, and together!
All my financial institutions are supported; the only thing I’d love to see is a bill reminder type of deal. To have all those together to see when everything is due, ect.
I also have Mint on my iPhone which is pretty awesome! I can check my overall portfolio gain, account balanaces, and everything on the go. : )
The only weird bug I’m having is where it doesn’t display my interest rate for my Capital One CD – My other Capital One account displays fine.
For me (btw i love mint!) the biggest missing piece is the ability to see some sort of balance forcasting. if i go out and send out payments to all my bills and maybe have some other large transactions pending, maybe some payments coming in from clients, etc …. the balance i get from what is current at that moment in my various accounts tells me nothing. because of this i found that i have had to use an additional app (currently using a simple iphone app called ‘Balance’) where I can enter in my account balance, then enter in the bills i paid that havent gone through yet, maybe checks that are on their way in from clients, etc so that i can have a general idea of this “other” balance. It would be ideal if mint added an area to the interface where it brings in the account balances, then gives a place to manually enter some data that would be use to give an adjusted balance view — nothing permanent or built-in to the transaction download system or anything like that – just something simple would be enough i think!
it would also be great if mint.com integrated with Freshbooks online invoicing system, and if Mint had better support for bills.
Hi Dana.
You might want to look into PocketSmith. I believe it does something to the effect of what you’re looking for. (I have set up an account myself, but have yet to try it out.)