Why You Need Mint

No, you don’t have bad breath . . . this is the kind of Mint that helps you track your spending, a FREE online tool that’s been helping the spend-conscious for close to three years now and recently bought by Intuit.

Before Mint, your only options were keeping a self-generated tracking report in excel or using Quicken.  Quicken takes too long, so people end up abandoning it, usually after putting in hours to get it set up.  With Quicken, you download your banking into Quicken and go through each expense, verifying its category. The process takes an hour or so, mainly because you have to go online to look up check payees and verify something was what you think it was.

If you fall behind, it’s really difficult to get back on track and caught up, because then you start dreading doing it knowing how long it’s going to take.  How will you remember in December why we withdrew $100 from an ATM in September?

A lot of people were initially nervous about Mint’s online security.  But in the comments of Get Rich Slowly’s early review of Mint, Founder and CEO Aaron Patzer wrote: “You’re safer on Mint than with online banking. Mint has a read-only connection to your bank; there’s no money transfer in Mint.”

He also pointed out the physical security, proactive account activity alerts, and that Mint uses Yodlee on the back-end. (Yodlee has been in operation for 10 years without a major security breach.)

After you get past the security issue, a lot of Mint’s features might help you avoid what made Quicken fail as a tracking tool, such as:

It’s online. You can log onto Mint whenever and modify transactions, if needed.  Because you can do it on the fly, it’s easier to keep up with it (plus I think Mint does a better job of assigning categories than Quicken ever did).

It’s simple. When you open Mint, the accounts are listed down the left-hand side and the budget is on the right. The budget is a bar graph showing how much you’ve spent in each category for the month and how much was allotted for that category. Simple.

It has alerts.  You can set up alerts for the low balances, bill reminders, credit available, unusual spending, over budget, interest rate changes, trade commission charges, bank fees, large deposits, and large purchases.

I haven’t spoken to anyone who doesn’t like Mint after they try it, so it may just be the thing you need to FINALLY gain clarity around your spending.  Now, go get set up!  www.mint.com