Mint.com is another in a long line of personal budgeting tools that allows you to see your whole financial life in one place. Whether it’s checking, savings, credit cards, PayPal, investments, retirement accounts or many other personal finance accounts, Mint.com is your one stop shop to manage them all.
If you’ve ever used Quicken Online, then you should have a sense of what Mint.com can do. Why else would Quicken’s parent company, Intuit, acquire Mint.com last year and plan to migrate all Quicken Online customers to Mint? Mint.com’s 1.5 million customers definitely have something to do with it.
Before I go into specifics, let me say that there is a difference between liking a product and liking what it does for you. Mint.com is an example of an innovation that delivers on both. It’s an inherently good concept and very well executed. I researched the product myself, then researched what other users thought of it. What follows is an amalgamation of both to provide a complete review of Mint.com.
To begin, simply create a Mint account by adding your bank, credit card, home loan and investment account information. This takes roughly five minutes and once you’ve completed entering all of your personal information, Mint.com goes into action.
What Makes Mint.com So Awesome?
First and foremost, it’s free. Who can object to free when software like Quicken Deluxe 2010 costs $60. Second, Mint.com is terribly easy to use, which is why over 1.5 million users house their budget there. It categorizes everything for you, every day. You can name the categories yourself, and rename whenever you want so if you’re not happy with the default options Mint.com has set up for you, no worries. 
With Mint.com one click gets you the big picture or dozens of ways to slice and dice the small picture. You can look at your spending historically to help identify and prepare for peak spending months. For me, that’s air conditioning season. This example can show you just how much you spend on auto insurance each month:
Everyone should also spend a minute with the savings goal feature. Mint.com can show you how much you’ll save if you stop doing something or start doing something else. You can also set up alerts to help with overspending or over drafting on an account, and receive a weekly summary of incoming and outgoing money.
Another differentiation I really like is SpendSpace, a function that tells you how your spending stacks up to the average person in your area. This is cool and can work for or against your financial ego. Either way, it’s good to know where you stand.
The Drawbacks of Mint.com
You can’t make every customer happy and we’ve detailed some of the most common complaints from Mint.com users:
“If your stuff works, then great. If it doesn’t, you’re out of luck. They don’t respond to email requests for help, they don’t have a good FAQ section and the forums are pretty much useless.”
Importantly, this post occurred in January of this year, so it’s likely up-to-date intel. Given that Intuit is near-famous for bad customer service, this isn’t a huge surprise.
“I love mint.com except for one problem. It is VERY slow to add additional financial institutions. It allows you to request the addition of a bank that it currently doesn’t support, but after making that request, you can wait months and months without the bank being added and without any information from mint.com on whether it is making an attempt to add that bank. In my case, this means that my primary bank, where I do my daily banking, is not included in the spending or income information shown on my mint.com account. This, unfortunately, is a huge downside to using Mint.com.”
So here’s where I come out on Mint.com. If you’re a visual learner, like me, Mint.com has all the right graphs and charts to make me feel in control of my finances. It’s orderly, easy, and don’t forget, free. I suppose your expectation level will dictate how well you like this product. I expect mass market products to have pitfalls. Nothing can be everything to everyone (That makes sense right?). If you’re on the fence on whether or not to use Mint.com, just look at all of the information you see simply after you’ve logged in.
Mint.com was already named the best online personal finance tool by Money Magazine, PC Magazine, and is PC World’s Editor’s Choice. Industry watchers are expecting every last kink to be worked out now that Intuit is bankrolling the site. You need not worry about Intuit changing the product much because Mint.com founder and CEO, Aaron Patzer was acquired along with his brand. Thankfully for all Mint customers, Aaron is still running the show.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Your intel is assuredly out-of-date. I had issues with a credit card and also having an account that was unable to be added. Every issue was responded to quickly (by a real person). The forum I feel brought common issues to the forefront and the credit problem was fixed in less than a week. On the other hand, the account took a while to be added. I was okay with manually updating the information for a few months until it was eventually able to auto-update.
I see Mint.com as only getting better while they continue to fine tune the web based feature.
A few months ago I was doing some research trying to find the best personal finance software. Mint.com was definitely one of the best free products. Those who liked it especially liked how you could access your information from any computer.
While most people loved it three common criticisms came across included (1) password security (2) the number of ads (3) the fact that you couldn’t do anything about upcoming money plans only what had already been spent.
For people with those concerns a desktop version would be better.
I like to manage my own budget manually using excel. Mint and other online tools may be powerful and useful, but I feel I have more control over the money I spend by manually managing where my money goes. I guess I’m just more old fashioned.
This website is a great idea for getting your finances in order. I like the visuals and it seems very easy to use. Thanks for the post.
Mint is slow not just to add new banks, but to update your recent transaction information. Every time I have logged in over the last three months, it says “we’re getting the most recent info from your account, it will just be a second” but this usually takes 5-10 minutes (for my BofA account).
If you use Mint regularly, be sure to have another task like cooking dinner to occupy yourself with while it chugs and chugs.
Something has happened recently to Mint.com. It used to work beautifully for me and then all of a sudden my account won’t update for days at a time. I tried deleting the accounts and then adding them back on. Now I can’t even add the accounts back on that I used to have on there. I am very unhappy and do not recommend this site at all until they fix whatever has happened. It has become useless to me since it won’t update my accounts.
I have a dozen or so accounts on Mint. A full 50% do not update and my attempts to correct the issue via clicking on the “Fix It” usually ends up with a message “Temporary Issue try back later”. I have yet to have an account update after waiting. Mint is a great concept in theory and it will remain that way until Mint figures out how to consistently update accounts. As it functions now I could update my finances more quickly by visiting each site individually and entering the info in a spreadsheet.
Since intuit bought this site it sounds like it has gone downhill. They have kicked all of its Quicken Online customers off QO and forced them onto Mint and have removed all the functions that QO customers liked. This product is horrible. Not only do I recommend not using Mint I recommend not purchasing any Quicken and intuit products (i.e. Turbo Tax) due to their destruction of two perfectly good sites.
They can’t seem to get my main card issue resolved. It has been over a month. Service is truly lacking. I would not recommend the site.