Mint.com Review
I've heard about www.mint.com from at least two different sources in this last week, so I decided to check them out myself. It looks like Intuit (same people that make Quickbooks) is behind Mint.com. Now I've heard enough personal testimony to believe it has and can help some people. Personally I'm gonna skip it.
The Good: Mint.com can help you track your credit card, banks accounts, and investments, to see where you're spending and how your savings and investments are growing/needs to grow. It also generates offers and advice that may help you find better interest rates, ways to cut costs, etc. And it's a free service.
Without signing up for the service you can still read their blog, which is on a variety of financial issues...I think this entry on the pitfalls of payday loans or this article on how to avoid unnecessary car costs a good one.
The Bad: To make use of this service you have to give mint.com all your bank and credit card login info/passwords. That alone is a deal breaker for me. It's not because I don't trust Intuit. As a company they seem to have a pretty good track record, and they're taking the data secuity thing seriously (or seem to at least). But all it takes is one really determined hacker, or the wrong disgruntled employee to get this data into the wrong hands.
Mint.com doesn't have a good system for tracking cash. So it encourages you to use your debit and credit cards to make it work. People spend more when they use debit and credit cards. And it doesn't have a way to manually input bank account data either without handing them the login keys to your bank account.
Aside from the advice it generates, the site doesn't do anything that you couldn't do for yourself, except maybe they do it with prettier graphics.
After posting this, I ran across this bit of information while researching something entirely different:
From this article Money Basics: Savings Accounts on www.consumerismcommentary.com
"Another popular fee is related to software. I mentioned Quicken above for keeping track of your savings account, but some banks will charge you a monthly fee if you connect to your bank’s electronic records directly from the program. In 2007, Wachovia charged me a surprise $5.95 for using Quicken, as I had been for several years. The bank changed their policy for some types of accounts, but the policy wasn’t intended to apply to the type of account I had. I was able to talk to a customer service representative to have the fee removed and a note placed on my account that would supposedly prevent that fee from ever being charged to me again. You might be able to talk your away out of these fees as well, but it’s better to avoid them in the first place."
So, while mint.com itself is free, your bank may charge you for using it. Obviously not every bank does this, but I would double check before signing up.