Thanks to a mention by Jonathan Coulton, I am now trying out Mint, an online personal-finance program. I tried to restart Quicken from scratch a few years ago, but all of the data entry and balancing quickly became too tedious, and I gave up. After all, it’s hard to stick to a monthly budget when you don’t get your transactions entered until after the month is over.
With those problems in mind, enter Mint! Mint recognizes that data entry and balancing are the most tedious aspects of any personal-finance system, so Mint is makes it easy for you. In fact, once you complete the initial setup, you never need to enter any transactions again. (Well, you may want to tweak the already-entered transactions, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
How does Mint manage this monumental task? It’s simple: You just give it the online IDs and passwords to your financial institutions, and Mint automatically downloads and categorizes the transactions every day. Now, I know what you’re saying (and apparently everyone else online): This sounds monumentally unsafe. From what I can tell, the passwords are kept securely, and your name or account numbers are never entered, so there’s nothing that anyone could ever DO with the data, even if they got it. So if you can get past that hurdle, you will have a system where every transaction is automatically tracked each day, and you can see where your money is going at any given point in time.
So how well does it work? Well, I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far, it seems pretty good. You can set up your own categories, set budget numbers, and Mint even tries to automatically categorize transactions for you (although I have no idea how it manages to do this). And if you have some retailer that it doesn’t recognize (like the local Gas Depot by my house), you can just assign it a category, then tell Mint that all future transactions with that retailer should be assigned the same category. You can also set up monthly budgets (Mint will tell you your average monthly expenditures for any category, if you need a baseline), and you can even get email or text-message alerts when your budget items go too high, or your account balances drop too low.
It doesn’t have as many options as Quicken, and I certainly wouldn’t use it to track every transaction to the penny. (There is no account for Cash, for example.) But for a reasonably close snapshot of your current financial state, with little to no data entry involved, Mint beats Quicken hands-down.
