MythTip: Use Mint.com

Today, we are going to take a look at my favorite online (and FREE) personal finance software: Mint.com.

Traditional Software

For a number of years, I used Quicken’s basic finance software to track my expenses and monitor my budget. While the program was very good, there were a few ways in which these new online tools are better suited for most people. The primary challenge was the complexity of Quicken. While uploading our transactions and categorizing them was fairly straightforward, accessing the reports could be quite confusing. The software is very powerful and has many many useful reports, but the problem was that I did not know how to use the vast majority of the reports, and setting them up to be easily useful was very difficult. The complexity and wide array of available reports made it a bit time consuming to use, and somewhat frustrating at times. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time budgeting, so as a result I did not track my finances as closely as I would have liked.

Mint.com

The first thing you may notice when you go to Mint.com is the fresh, very Web 2.0 styling. The visuals and colors all pull together to make the site very easy on the eyes. But, we’re not here for fine web design, are we?

Setting up your accounts in Mint is very very easy. Just enter the name of your bank, then the log in information, and you’re done. Mint’s claim that you can set up your account in 5 minutes may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. I think it took me about 7 minutes to set up all my accounts. Very easy, simple, and straightforward.

Mint.com automatically updates all of your accounts each time you log on. When it updates, it categorizes your expenses for you. The categorizations it makes are pretty accurate, but you will of course need to check on the them and make some changes.

My favorite thing about Mint is that it shows you your net income for each month. This chart helps you gauge how well you are doing month by month, and if you are having success in saving money. It also shows you if your spending is trending upward or downward, and by how much. As you can see, I made a major purchase in September, followed up with some bonus income in October. But, as a whole, my net income each month is positive. This is what you want your net income to look like also. If you have negative net income, then there is a major problem and you need to take drastic steps to change your spending habits.

One thing to make sure you use on Mint is the budget tool. It is VERY simple and easy to read. You simply enter how much you want to spend in a given category each month. Then, as the month progresses, the budget area will keep a running total of how much you have spent in those categories. Piece of cake.

Another great thing about Mint.com is that it is super easy to pull up a pie chart showing the areas where you are spending your money. The pie chart allows you to drill down into the data for each category. So, if you see the category “Groceries”, you can click on it and it will change the chart to show you all you “groceries” purchases. Then you can click on a purchase to go to the transaction page for that transaction to view the details and make any changes that may be needed.

Mint also provides you with alerts when it notices a change in your spending habits, or when you are over budget. You can choose to have Mint email you when you overspend on your budget, or when you have unusually large transactions occur. You can always opt out of the emails, but the main page of Mint will always display these alerts for you.

Overall, Mint.com is the best personal finance software I have ever used. It is fast, easy, convenient, and powerful. I recommend all my readers use Mint.com.