Track Your Spending: Mint

After trying Microsoft Money and being disappointed I decided to try one of the the new players on the block: Mint. Mint is part of a new generation of Web 2.0 personal finance applications and is currently in beta. On the website, Mint claims that setup takes under 5 minutes. I had my primary bank account configured in about 2 and had added two additional accounts in under 10. I considered this to be quite acceptable.

Once I had the accounts configured, I spent another 30 minutes fine tuning the categories assigned to my spending. Overall I found this to be acceptable as well. Mint did a great job of categorizing the majority of my transactions and for several of them, I know why they were categorized incorrectly, but give them props for the tool being smart enough to do even do that. I had 3 transactions where the display name for the transaction included the words “Membership Fees”. Mint categorized them accordingly, though for me they actually fall under education (it was the monthly tuition payment for my son to attend Paul Green’s School of Rock). The number of uncategorized transactions was relatively small and the UI made it easy to apply the same categorization to all transactions of the same type.

Mint is off to a great start, but isn’t quite a complete financial management platform. Here are a few of the shortcomings, though by listing them here I am by no means saying they should necessarily be deal killers depending on your needs.

• US institutions only
• No custom categories
• Doesn’t support 2 factor authentication
• Can’t import historical data from other applications
• No support for other account types (car loans, student loans, investment accounts)

Some of these limitations aren’t the deal killers for me they might be for others. Even if they seem to be deal killers, I encourage you to check out this application. The clean UI, ease of setup and reporting features are worth taking a look.

While this may not become my primary tool for managing my finances, at the moment I am leaning towards continuing to use Mint on a periodic basis to see basic snapshots of my spending and budget. It was so quick and easy to set up that I don’t anticipate it taking more than 10-15 minutes a month to maintain. With something that quick and easy to use, it’s worth logging in occasionally to see if their unique way of looking at my finances yields any insights.

Summary: If you haven’t used another tool to track your finances in the past, have just a few accounts and want a free tool to track your spending and budgets Mint seems to be a great place to start. As they add more features Mint may become even more compelling.