As some know, I had a bit of a startling experience with online money management software in the past. See this Tech Crunch story for the details. But it didn’t totally put me off the concept. I like being able to see everything in one place, and it’s nice to get an overview of the whole financial situation.
I can track all those electronics purchases and it’s a good way to keep my spending balanced and in check. When half your purchases are gadgets, you know you have a problem!
Mint lets you put in all your account information, and gives you an overview of your financial health and is really clear about where you’re spending your money.
You can categorize purchases, set up a budget and you get to see detail on all your accounts by logging into one place. Oh, yes, and it’s all FREE.
They don’t store your account information – they just give you a way to log in from their interface and pull your account transactions into it. So even if someone gets into your account, the worst that could happen is they see your balances–there’s no way to manipulate the data or gain access to the accounts; the passwords and usernames aren’t available in the Mint interface.
I’m impressed with the robust tools available. Bank of America has a decent set of tools for doing this, but Mint.com has them totall beat. When I looked at Mint about a year ago, I wasn’t able to get all my credit card accounts added to it, so it was sort of useless. But now it easily logged into all the accounts I have.
You can set up alerts to warn you when your account limit is low, when you have bills due, when payments post and more. Every once in a while I need to manually refresh it because some account or another is way behind in posting transactions, but overall it’s pretty up to date and super easy to use. It’s so much nicer than sitting down with a spreadsheet, and the categorization lets you make pretty graphs (and I’m a sucker for pretty stats).
I’d highly recommend giving Mint a spin. They make their money recommending services and savings to you, but they’re not pushy about it. It’s a great service and you just can’t beat the price.
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