This time around I’d like to talk about my favorite finance tool ever – Mint. This is one of those things that people are either for or against; lots of people don’t like their information being accessed by another server. However, you’re giving your personal data up to the internet the second you put it on there anyway.

I’ve had no problems with mint, and I’m all for convenient technological gizmos. I love anything that makes managing my finances easier; and I have a lot of accounts. At one time I had a CD, a savings account, checking account, business checking account, paypal account, stock account, log ons for each bill, and who the hell knows what else that I’ve forgotten to mention.

Mint fixes this dilemma by letting me view what’s going on with these accounts all in one place. Now, you can’t do things like withdraw or deposit money with Mint’s site – Only view information. However, this is very useful, because it gives you what we all need to see! The big financial picture incorporating all of your accounts together side by side.

If you like you can also set budgets, and Mint will e-mail you a nice little reminder if you go over. For example if you set $100 limit for resturants, and you eat out in the $120 range then you’ll get a big cease and desist e-mail. For people who are too free with their debit cards this could be a good thing.

The comptuer is pretty smart at figuring out which items are which, but some could be a little tricky. If you need to you can re-label this items yourself to make sure they’re detected correctly. By checking a little box you can be sure they get labeled right from then on too.

They recently added stock brokerage participation, and so now I can even see how my stocks are doing with everything else. You’ll get a nice little set up that will compare cash to debt just so you can know how far in the hole you really are!.. Well, some people may not want to know that..

You can also add your loans, and credit cards to analyze your debt. Seeing it all in perspective might be enough to make you put down the plastic, and do without that new expensive leather jacket for a while.

Mint will also try to match you with offers to save you money. These have yet to be very helpful to me though, and this section could us some work honestly. It’s basically how they pay the bills around there I think. I always have ‘amazing’ credit card offers, but the system doesn’t take into account that the new ‘lower rate’ is only introductory, and I won’t be saving anything by changing. My rate is already the same as they’re offering usually. They also keep trying to offer me a lower CD rate than what I have, because for some reason it won’t display my real APY percentage on Mint.

I would love to see your standard bills be added to Mint’s arsenal. Honestly, I forget when they’re due sometimes. Even if I have the money I just can’t seem to peg down some of the changing ones like the electric bill. It would be great for mint to collect this information, and display it all in one place.

I do get sent reminders for some, but not others! I signed up for paperless billing from AT&T expecting an e-mail bill from them. Nope! Not a word, they’d let it be late. No option in my profile to get one from them either. No idea what’s up with that, but oh well I guess. They do have bill reminders for credit cards though.

I’d also like to see Mint Mobile come into play. The site does function decently on my iPhone, but I’d love to see an exclusively mobile version of the site. This would take it from a cool dodad to a necessity for most people. Being able to click an App on their home screen, and see everything at once would make a big difference to Mint’s traffic I think. Able to view checking, savings, and credit balances all in a second? Awesome.

Mint still has a five star rating from me, and I recommend their service to anybody looking to simply life a little bit.

Originally posted 2008-11-29 12:06:52. Republished by Blog Post Promoter