I’ve been sitting on the sideline when it comes to signing up for an online tool that allows me to get a consolidated view of all my investment and bank accounts. The main reason is that I didn’t want to offer up my account logins for fear of creating extra drama in my life. I finally bit the bullet yesterday and am somewhat surprised at how well mint.com works.
I started by creating a personal unique login and password to the site. Once I was in, it was incredibly easy to see how you add accounts. There are large boxes on the screen that say, "Add an account". In most cases, adding an account is as easy as choosing your bank or financial institution and inputting your username and password. If your bank utilizes "challenge" questions for security, Mint gives you a drop down to choose which questions they ask. I was absolutely amazed to find that Mint supported both my company 401k and also my credit union. Wow.
Once I had all of my accounts linked up I spent some time wandering around the various report screens. It was great to automatically see where I spend my money and on what categories. Mint automatically assigned about 95% of my expenses to the correct categories. I spent about 10 minutes assigning the rest of them and asked Mint to remember how I categorized these expenses in the future. I’m guessing that I won’t have to do that much, except for the rare check that I write.
Overall, I’m very impressed with Mint. I’ll definitely use it.
So, what are it’s weaknesses? Well, I would really like to see them give users the ability to manually add in assets. At this point, it figures my net worth based on my investment balances and my mortgage balance. It doesn’t give me the ability to add the estimated value of my home or second home so I can’t see how my real estate holdings play in to my overall net worth. Hopefully they’ll add that feature in the future.
Is it safe? Based on what Mint.com says about privacy, I’m pretty comfortable with the security they have in place. They have multiple layers of protection including using encryption, and multiple third parties to validate their site security. Another reason I’m comfortable is that they don’t associate my name or other personal information with my account and don’t store that information on their servers. If someone gains access to my account, the only thing they can really do is see what I have in the accounts. They can’t even see the account numbers. You can read more about their privacy and security at: http://www.mint.com/privacy/
If you are looking for one place to aggregate your financial information, you should check out mint.com.
Disclosure:
(I’m a new user of Mint but I am not affiliated with them and do not receive any referral or kick back if you choose to use their site. I’m only giving you this information because I like the site. Everybody Loves Your Money is not responsible for your use of their site and takes no responsibility for your experience on mint.com)