Mint

About a month ago, I signed up with Mint.com. This was in an effort to a better sense of my financial situation. I want to start saving more money and possibly pay off some of my loans a little quicker. Mint is great at giving you an overall picture of your finances. It also has several other features. I've really liked some of them, and I'm still learning to use others. Mint is pretty customizable, so I can always change settings when I don't like the defaults. But I've been laughing at some things.

The best thing about Mint is having everything in one place. I can see my checking and savings accounts, my debt (credit card, student loan, and car loan), and my 401k. By far my favorite thing is being able to play with my 401k. Mint provides several features that aren't provided by the 401K itself. For instance, I can see the value every day, instead of simply receiving quarterly statements.This allows Mint to build graphs that let me see performance over time and compare my own performance to the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones. It has me excited to start some other investments, though I still need to do some more research on that.

Mint also adds up all my assets and debts and lets me know my net worth on any given day. I was really excited to discover that this is a positive number. I can also see how it changes month to month. Mint is all about the graphs, which is probably my favorite thing about it. I can see spending or income over time and break spending down by category or merchant. It's pretty handy for looking at where all my money goes.

There are a ways to set budgets and goals, which I'm still playing with. Mostly I use the goals to calculate how quickly I could pay off a loan with this or that payment amount. But since they don't integrate well with the budgets, I decided not to actually set up any goals. For example, my required student loan payment each month is $211, but I've been paying $300 to pay it down faster. When I enter in the budget and the goal, Mint decides to allocate $511 for student loans which isn't right and skews the budgets I have set up. So I just allocate the $300 right off the bat and forget about the goal.

I also haven't been able to figure out how to make budgets work for things I don't buy every month. I can say that I want to spend x amount each month and break that into categories. Mint builds little bar charts to show how much I've actually spent in relation to what I'm planning to spend across the categories. But if I make a one-time purchase in a different category (like a Father's Day gift), the amount doesn't show up in my total spending. It just disappears into the ether. I have to keep remembering to add my "uncategorized" spending to my "total" spending to get the actual total. I wish there were an easy way to integrate the two.

Mint also occasionally has problems categorizing things correctly. When I transferred money from my checking to my savings account, it got recorded as additional income. According to Mint I'd earned that money twice. I've also had some problems with credit card purchases getting recorded twice. My card doesn't get charged twice, but it looks like it was. This mostly happens at restaurants, when the card is initially charged for the meal amount and then a second time with the tip added in. Even though this overrides the initial charge, Mint doesn't always figure that out. It led to me thinking I'd spent significantly more while visiting a friend last weekend than I actually had. It's easy enough to delete or recategorize transactions once you figure out what's going on. But figuring out what happened can lead to some stress.

There are other features that are probably helpful to many people that I just find funny. On the mobile app, mint shows your net cash flow every month as a simple income - spending calculation. Since I get paid on the last day of the month, this is always negative and doesn't end up being very useful for me. There are also a lot of alerts I've had to turn off. Over the weekend I had to stop at a gas station ATM to get money for the tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because I'd forgotten to do this before leaving home. Mint immediately emailed me to let me know that the ATM had charged me a fee, something I was perfectly aware of. It also let me know when my rent check got cashed with a warning that "someone" had cashed an exceptionally large check.


All in all, the features I like make up for the ones that I'm finding less useful. There are a lot of customization options with Mint, and it's taking me a while to get it to the best state for me. I would definitely recommend it. Seeing the big financial picture has been a big help for me. Although I have yet to see if I actually succeeded in spending less this month than in months past.