Financial Reflections

Mint.com is a an online software budgeting package that is a huge success so far. I first heard about it through a “Twitter” sent from a friend who simply said “mint.com is pretty slick” He’s a graphic designer so I was expecting an Adobe Photoshop tutorial rather than a personal finance tool.

But what I found was pretty interesting. Mint seems to follow the “web 2.0″ style of fast, free and slick web design (that’s perpetually in “beta”) that so many other sites offer these days. What sets it apart is its relative ease of use.

In order to know what your balances are, Mint ask for your passwords. That is a huge hurdle for me. I’m hesitant enough to type my passwords on a public machine. Now one wants me to store them? Somehow Mint bridged that gap of trust. In case you’re interested, they have a full page on security, including a video. Still, one must be sure to follow standard safety procedures when accessing any online account.

With some of my accounts entered, I was impressed at how simple and effective the presentation of the data was. This worked pretty well with only my checking and savings entered. After a few days, I noticed that Mint was smart enough to know what I was spending and show how certain amounts (like gas) exceeded it’s preset budget levels. I live in Atlanta, where so many people have long commutes, so my gas budget would cause some folks to cry.

I did however encounter problems when entering multiple accounts. Mint is set up with many banks and financial institutions already, but I found a couple of my accounts were (and still are) hard to set up. For some reason, I couldn’t set up one of the accounts at all. Maybe that will be resolved over time.

The other issue I encountered was the speed of updates. I just logged into Mint and still can’t see my updates after 5 minutes. Again, I hope this improves over time, because the interface so far is great.

Mint is free. So who’s paying for the party? You are, sort of. Mint analyzes your accounts and offers you ways to improve, which is essentially very targeted advertising. LinkedIn has done that with job searches and has done really well. I wish Mint the same success as they try to improve an already useful service.

Note: I called this “Part 1″ as I’m hoping to dive deeper into what Mint offers and see how their service improves.  Stay tuned for future reviews.