A couple of weeks ago we signed up for Mint.
Mint.com is a free, online personal financial site owned by Intuit. It consolidates all of your saving, checking, investment, and credit card accounts in one place. I have seen it recommended at other financial planning blogs and websites and had been meaning to try it. I'm so glad that I did. It's one of those things where I asked myself why I had waited so long to give it a try.
What
I love about it is that I only have to remember one user name and
password. I log on and Mint updates all of my accounts in one place.
Before using Mint, I had to log into each account separately. There
were some accounts like my 401K or IRA that I rarely checked because it was a pain to remember or look up the site, username, and password. Now, I log onto mint.com and I see an overview of all my accounts and their current value. I can click on any account and see all of the recent transactions.
Initially,
it was a little bit of work entering all of our accounts. Craig entered
his accounts too so that we can see his accounts, my accounts, and our
joint accounts. We have also entered our mortgage, estimated home value,
and car values. With all this info entered, Mint gives us an overview
of all of our assets and debts with our net worth. This is a great
motivator for saving. We want to see the net worth number go up so I hope that will make us spend less and save more. It goes back to the
Suze's third rule from last week's post to "simply try to get as much pleasure out of saving as you do spending."
Mint has a Take a Tour function that will guide you through the following sections of the site:
- Alerts - Tells you when bills are due or when you have gone over budget. You can set it up to get an email and/or a text message. Coincidentally, when Craig signed up, he saw that some criminal had fraudulently charged tickets on Air India on his credit card. He called the credit card company and got it cleared up. If he hadn't noticed the charge on Mint, it would have been more of a headache to correct.
- Advice - Offers advice on saving opportunities and recommends ways to meet your goal. The explanation says, "As we get to know you, we'll begin to offer easy-to-follow advice based on your lifestyle and goals." The "as we get to know you" seems a bit creepy to me. I've been avoiding the "Advice" section because my feeling is that it's there to sell me products that they've identified I might be interested based on my buying/saving history. This is most likely their subtle advertising and what makes Mint free.
- Bills - Organizes your bills and sends email or text reminders about upcoming bills.
- Budget - Based on average amount spent on each category, Mint sets up a recommended budget.
- Taxes - Claims to help prepare taxes, estimate your refund, and find deductions. This is a tie-in to TurboTax which is also owned by Mint.
- Goal - You can set certain goals and use their calculators to see if you are on track to reach your goal.
- Investments - Gives you a high-level view of your investments with fancy charts.
- Ways to Save - Suggests best offers and ways to save. See the description for Advice.
- Trends - Shows charts and history of your accounts.
- Accounts - Shows you all of the balances for your accounts with your net worth.
The other cool
thing is that Mint sends a weekly report of the changes for that week to your accounts. Although, I usually check it on a daily basis so the weekly report really doesn't tell me anything that I don't already know. Still, it's nice to effortlessly get a weekly summary of how your spending went for the week. Overall, I've really enjoyed using Mint and being able to view all of my accounts in one place.
