Mint Review: Managing Your Money with Web 2.0 >> The Far Side of Tech

As of today Mint .com, the much-hyped Web 2.0 personal finance site, is open to the public. This also means that their NDA has expired, so I’ll finally be able to share what I’ve learned about the service while beta testing it these past few weeks.

Mint Logo

Please note that the screenshots on this page were grabbed from Mint’s feature page. They mentioned that they would make screenshots available to bloggers and press, but I have yet to see any pop up on their press resource page. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any screenshots of my own because every page is chock full of private financial data.

Overview

If you’re at all interested in keeping track of your spending habits but just can’t find the motivation to configure and update traditional financing software, then Mint is exactly what you’ve been looking for. It allows you to track the activity across multiple accounts, including checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, all in one convenient location.

Using Mint

After the initial sign up is completed you then configure Mint to keep track of your various accounts. Upon successful authentication for each account, which they assure is bank-level secure, Mint then gives you an overview page showing your total cash and debt, and a nifty comparison between the two. It also allows you to get a quick glance at your current spending trends–something which really deserves special mention: Mint’s intelligent tracking for spending trends is by far its best feature.

Spending Trend Analysis

While it offers the ability to see all of your transactions in a typical list format (more on this list later), Mint’s trend analysis brings all of that data to the next level. At the top of the “Spending Trends” page you have a pie chart that organizes your spending into useful categories like “Bills”, “Entertainment”, and “Food and Dining”. By clicking on an individual slice of the pie you then get a more specific view of your spending within that category. When looking at the “Entertainment” slice I’m presented with another pie chart that separates my spending into “Arts”, “Movies and DVDs”, and “Other”.

Mint Spending Trends

I’ve found that Mint’s visual and categorical interpretation of my financial data to be extremely useful. Buying an individual DVD here or there may normally seem harmless, but seeing your “Entertainment” slice account for a hefty chunk of your spending for the month is a definite wake up call. Thankfully, this isn’t typical behavior for me: This past month I’ve been honeymooning with my HD-DVD player, so I’ve definitely spent gobs more on (HD)-DVDs than I typically do.

Below the main pie chart on the trends page you have the ability to dynamically adjust the time for which Mint is determining trends. Unfortunately they only offer a horizontal slider with a vague monthly time line for doing so. For example, you could easily use it analyze what you’ve spent between the middle of August to the end of September, but you don’t have any way of find the same information for specific dates. This is definitely something that has to be corrected.

The last part of the trends page uses bar graphs to compare what you’ve spent across individual categories over the past six months. Since Mint can only track expense data starting the month that you’ve signed up for the service,this feature won’t be entirely useful until you’ve used Mint for a few months. It seems strange that Mint can’t analyze data from the months before joining given that it should have access to the older transaction data from your bank and credit card companies. I’m going to do some research to see if this is an issue that is peculiar to me for some reason.

Also take note that you’re limited to only viewing the past six months of comparison graphs. I’m sure many users would appreciate the ability to compare trends further than that.

The Transaction Page

Fresh out of the box (so to speak), I was impressed with the relative accuracy that Mint parsed my transactions into categories. It’s not entirely perfect however, and that’s where the Transaction page I mentioned above comes into play. Here you get a convenient list of your transactions across your multiple accounts. You can of course search for specific transactions and view transactions within individual accounts, but Mint stays true to it’s Web 2.0 roots by allowing you to assign “Labels” (read: Tags) to transactions as well as changing the category for a transaction.

Mint Transactions

Changing the category affects what the Spending Trends page displays, so it’s worth the extra effort to make sure that your transactions are all categorize correctly. You can also assign category rules that can get applied to specific transaction names. For example, quirky restaurant names tend to confuse Mint’s auto-categorizing algorithm, so you’ll want to make sure that a rule is set up on them to put them in the “Restaurant” category.

Even though you may have to spend some time clarifying transaction categories it’s still far less time than you would spend keeping Quicken up to date. Also, since you can set up rules on transactions Mint will eventually “learn” to categorize all of your common transactions correctly.

Ways to Save

Mint’s other claim to fame is its ability to recommend ways that you can save money. This all occurs in the “Ways to Save” tab. Mint will recognize things that you subscribe to, your cable provider or bank institution, for example, and offer up alternative solutions that could save you money. Right now it’s recommending that I use Verizon fiber internet instead of Comcast cable internet.

I suspect that this is the main way Mint is going to be earning money. Given that the service is ad free at this point, I can’t really accept that these “deals” are entirely altruistic. Still, if some people are able to save money and Mint gets a referral cut I see nothing wrong with that. I expect that Mint will favor the deals that make them more money, rather than the ones that save more money for users.

Automatic Alerts

Mint can also automatically alert you through SMS or e-mail on the following topics (copied from their features page):

Low balances in any checking/savings account

Credit card bill due dates

Available credit on credit cards

High/unusual spending by category (i.e. Shopping, Dining, Gas)

Bank/ATM fees and finance charges

Large purchases

Large deposits becoming available

Although I didn’t use these extensively, I could definitely see the value in having an alert set up in case of low checking account balance or strange high spending. This is the sort of thing that worries me about new technology though: Users may end up using these reminders from Mint as a crutch and may just get even lazier about remember to pay their bills. Unfortunately, that seems to be the inevitable cost when technology makes things more convenient.

Wrapping Up

Overall I’m very pleased with Mint at this point. Given all the hype its uberexclusive beta was gathering, I’m glad to see that it is a somewhat revolutionary service. Mint’s main issue now isn’t so much internal. If they really want to succeed they’re going to have to find a bigger audience than the tech-savvy crowd. They’re going to have to convince the public that their service is secure and trustworthy, and they should make sure to publicize it in traditional media outlets as well.

Mint also needs to get a live demo so that people can play with ASAP. No matter how many screen shots, videos, or extensive write ups there are, Mint is the sort of service that some people, especially the general public, have to see in action to truly appreciate.

Finally, they need to add more robust features to the platform so that the service can fully compete with the likes of Quicken. They don’t need to add those crazy features that only Quicken masters learn to use, but they should allow you to export your data into a spreadsheet, and make it easy to cull tax-relevant data.

Given that Mint already has such a strong start, I suspect that they’ll only continue to get better as time goes on. The product also pretty much sells itself, so popularity among the service is pretty much guaranteed. This is a good thing–Mint is the sort of thing everyone should be using.