Frugal | Mint: I Stand Corrected

Mint: I Stand Corrected

Posted by Lynnae on January 7, 2008

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MintYou’ve no doubt seen mistakes in newspapers before. A mistake can be made on the front page of the paper. But where does the retraction run? In a little box in some obscure place in the newspaper. I’ve always hated that. I understand that people make mistakes, but when you make a mistake, you should own up to it.

So that’s what I’m doing. Not long ago, I reviewed Mint. In my rundown of the pros and cons, I said that one of the cons (in fact the only con) was that Mint had no up front budget support. I was wrong. A big thank you to Mint’s marketing director, Donna Wells, for pointing that out to me.

Donna gave me a link to a blog post explaining the budgeting feature, which took effect in October of last year. After Donna left her comment, I headed back to Mint to play around with the budgeting feature. Here’s what I found.

The Pros

Cons

Conclusion

If you can make Mint’s categories work for you, the budgeting feature is pretty good. It seems that Mint is always changing things for the better, and I am hopeful that the budgeting feature will continue to improve. I still love Mint, and I’m hoping that one day it will be the only money management application that I need.

One Final Note

Donna also left me a link to an article at PC World about how Mint can protect your accounts. I know some of you had expressed unease at the security of Mint, and this might be of interest to you. Also, here is a link to Mint’s page on their security.

So thank you once again, Donna, for setting me straight.

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Comments

10 Responses to “Mint: I Stand Corrected”

  1. Michael Kaply on January 7th, 2008 11:00 am

    Mint’s budgeting (and as far as I can tell, any budgeting software that works with transactions in your bank account) suffers from the same basic flaw:

    It assumes that a transaction applies to the month in which it cleared your bank account.

    Some examples of where this is necessary is when you make your mortgage payment at the end of the month, but it doesn’t post until the beginning of the next month. Or when you are paid at the end of the month, but you use it for the next month’s budget.

    Mint provides no way to virtually move transactions between months.

    In addition, budgeting is based on the “magic month” concept, rather than creating a budget that is unique to each month.

    Based on what I’ve seen so far of mint and other places, it seems like the people that write budgeting software have never actually lived on a budget before…

  2. Kacie on January 7th, 2008 11:35 am

    Thanks for the clarification! Your reviews on budgeting tools are really helpful to me, and I plan to highlight them on my blog next week some time.

    I hate it when newspapers don’t run corrections, as well. When I was an editor at our college newspaper and we had a big mistake on the front page, we ran a correction on the front page, usually above the fold. You can’t undo a mistake, but you can try to make amends.

  3. Anthony on January 7th, 2008 12:26 pm

    The major flaw I see with Mint is it makes it impossible to track cash purchases (unless I’m missing something). The budget will really fail you if you think you only spend $70/month on Starbuck’s, but in reality, you spend $100/month there because you sometimes pay for your coffee in cash that you withdrew from the ATM, received as a gift, etc.

  4. SavingDIva on January 7th, 2008 1:29 pm

    I have been thinking about using Mint, but I’m going to stick with my spreadsheets for right now.

  5. Patrick L on January 7th, 2008 2:47 pm

    Yes, you are correct on the lack of configurable categories. I find that I can’t even list “Property Tax” as a category. Another huge downside is that Mint doesn’t link up with Mutual fund accounts or investment accounts in sites like ETrade.

    So Mint doesn’t and cannot show a complete financial picture at all for many users.

  6. rocketc on January 7th, 2008 8:09 pm

    Has anyone had trouble or success in connecting Mint to FNBO?

  7. Harris on January 8th, 2008 12:50 pm

    Come on, budgets are so silly. Only buy what you need. Starbucks is never needed. Mint is just another encumbrance.

  8. Donna Wells on January 9th, 2008 9:18 pm

    Lynnae, I didn’t think your post was in error, maybe just an oversight. But I really appreciate your informing your readers about our budgeting feature. Your readers rightly call out some features we still need to create or fix. I appreciate the feedback and assure you that we’re working on many of these.

    Good news re Patrick L.’s comment: Mint.com will be adding investment accounts (and student loans and mortgages) over the next few months. Announced this publicly just yesterday (http://mint.com/press/downloads/release_20080108.pdf )

  9. Lynnae on January 9th, 2008 9:23 pm
    @Donna - I’m glad to hear that Mint is continuing to improve on things. I can’t wait to see how it continues to develop!

    And it was an oversight on my part, but I had said there wasn’t a budgeting feature, when there was. It’s only fair that I corrected my mistake. And I’m glad you mentioned it to me. I’d hate to think I was giving my readers the wrong information.

  10. Tom Krieglstein on January 20th, 2008 8:29 am

    Here is another site that might be worth reviewing. I think it is newer to the field, but looks slick.

    https://www.spendview.com/default.aspx

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