Over the weekend, I did a bunch of research on personal financial tools as part of an effort to get my household spending organized better. Some quick scans of reviews on Amazon scared me away from the Mac version of Quicken (1.5 stars out of 5 over 248 reviews means stay away) so I took a closer look at Mint.com. Anyone who spends time on Lifehacker has heard of Mint.com, which acts as an online Quicken, if Quicken was still good at what it was supposed to do.
After taking the plunge (I had to be convinced to offer up my personal financial information to the internets) I came away impressed. From an information design standpoint, everything is organized very logically and well. The budgeting tools are standouts, as well as the transactions section, and I spent little time clicking around trying to find this page or that section. Also, after I logged in to my account, I saw absolutely no corporate links until I scrolled to the bottom of the page—a refreshing change.
There are features built into Mint.com that rival real applications; there’s little need for constant refreshing of pages or clicking from one section to the next. The algorithm for guessing and classifying transactions is very sharp, and the tool for editing any and all transactions is (I’m presuming) AJAX-based, so things change in real-time. I have a lot more updating and organizing to do before I’ll really start seeing some of the benefits—classifying checks and setting budgets, for example—but spending two minutes in the Goals section made me realize just how much more I need to be saving for my retirement.
They have also sweated the details, and it shows. For example: Deleting an account isn’t just clicking a box and seeing a modal dialog pop up with another button (e.g., are you sure you want to delete XXX?) The dialog asks you to type out the word Delete so that you really think about what you’re doing before you delete all your investment information.
Read up on Mint if you decide to try it out; Lifehacker has a few good tips for setting things up before you sign up for an account (create a Mint.com-only email address, don’t use unprotected wifi access points, change your password often). And, they offer Android and iPhone apps to make life easier. (I’ll append this with a short review of the iPhone app after I’ve used it a little more).
One Comment
Sean Carton said...
I'm a big fan of Mint, especially the budgeting and goals features. Probably the best part, however, is how it seems to magically classify your spending into the right categories! It's pretty illuminating to be able to look at a graph of where your money goes each month. A bit scary, too!