[Atlantic]

I want to step up my budgeting game.
Is Mint.com worth using and how secure is it? I have done some research but Id like to get some opinions of people on here who use it.

[Ensam]

I use it for tracking expenses. The budgeting tools are kinda weak so I still use an excel spreadsheet for planning. As far as security goes there's no way for someone who guesses your Mint password to get into any of your accounts but I suppose if someone hacked their servers you might be vulnerable. It's a risk I'm comfortable with.

[svenski7]

WestCoast spoke highly of Mint.

[Atlantic]

Thanks Ensam. I just downloaded it. Any advice for using it or does it just take care of itself?

[Ensam]

I use it on the web. Put your accounts in. Start going through and categorizing your transactions. The basic categories they have are pretty good - I'm not sure I even had to add any. After a while it will learn what category to put different transactions in automatically. I've been using it for two years now and I haven't had to categorize an expense in a few months. It's pretty fool proof.

[speakeasy]

I've been using it for several years. I love it. I don't use the budgeting stuff, I just like to have one convenient place to see and categorize where all my money is going. I can only imagine how much money they make gathering intricate financial and spending data on everyone and selling it to banks and credit card companies, but like they say, "if it's free, then you're the product being sold." Yeah, the more I think about it, mint is nothing more than a data gathering service that we willingly give hand private information to. But I get value out of it.

[MikeCF]

I've used it for years.

It's a fantastic resource. You can keep track of spending and will be surprised by how much you've been spending.

It also flags all fees, which often magically appear from credit cards and banks even when you pay on time.

[Christian McQueen]

Been using it for over two years and never had a problem.

It's great for tracking those pesky little daily expenses.

[Atlantic]

I am loving Mint. Some crazy discoveries so far - my food bills account for 41% of my expenses. Damn.

[Atlantic]

(06-25-2014 10:42 PM)MikeCF Wrote:  

I've used it for years.

It's a fantastic resource. You can keep track of spending and will be surprised by how much you've been spending.

It also flags all fees, which often magically appear from credit cards and banks even when you pay on time.

Mike I'll check out that book - The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness.

Any other finance management books that you or others recommend?

So far looking at Mint I can see I am over spending in quite a few areas.

This year is about getting my finances in order and saving as much as possible. Then next year I will start looking into investments, property etc.

[MikeCF]

(06-26-2014 12:05 AM)Atlantic Wrote:  

Any other finance management books that you or others recommend?

So far looking at Mint I can see I am over spending in quite a few areas.

This year is about getting my finances in order and saving as much as possible. Then next year I will start looking into investments, property etc.

That book is a good start, as it's about the mindset of money.

You already have a great mindset for making it. You took the initiative to go to the oil sands.

You have an abundance mentality, as you shared this information with others rather than store is with yourself due to fear of competition.

"Think and Grow Rich" would be a good one for you to read if you haven't already, since you intuitively understand the important concepts of money already.

[Menace]

Another app I have recently started using, in addition to Mint, is YNAB (You need a budget), (http://www.youneedabudget.com/ ). The main philosophy with it is that you assign a role for each dollar you make. Nothing is idle. It requires a more active role in budgeting; mint is rather passive and I was still spending too much.

YNAB requires a $60 desktop application (PC or Mac, but you get a license to install as many as you need I think). The companion phone app enables you to quickly enter spending as it happens. Takes 5 seconds. Everything is synced via DropBox, so you can install YNAB everywhere and always be in sync.

Just started using it this week, and so far I like it a lot. It will take me several months to fully take advantage of it as I go through full spending cycles.

[redbeard]

I've been using Mint for years and will cosign on it. it's also held by Intuit which I believe is the company behind TurboTax.

YNAB looks legit! Might have to upgrade. Also read Think & Grow Rich it changed my life.

[Isaac Jordan]

I love Mint, been using it for years.

If you check your spending breakdown regularly enough, you start to get a feel for how your money flows, and know intuitively if your purchases are getting out of hand.

After a few months of similar transactions, the app will also start notifying you if your spending goes above the usual in a given category. I enjoy checking it every other day (I also track stocks with it), but if you don't feel like micromanaging your finances this is a good alert to fall back on.

[Ensam]

(06-26-2014 11:19 AM)Menace Wrote:  

Another app I have recently started using, in addition to Mint, is YNAB (You need a budget), (http://www.youneedabudget.com/ ). The main philosophy with it is that you assign a role for each dollar you make. Nothing is idle. It requires a more active role in budgeting; mint is rather passive and I was still spending too much.

YNAB requires a $60 desktop application (PC or Mac, but you get a license to install as many as you need I think). The companion phone app enables you to quickly enter spending as it happens. Takes 5 seconds. Everything is synced via DropBox, so you can install YNAB everywhere and always be in sync.

Just started using it this week, and so far I like it a lot. It will take me several months to fully take advantage of it as I go through full spending cycles.

YNAB is great. It used to be an excel spreadsheet and I modeled the one I use after it. I made a few tweeks. They key realization I had is that there are very few one time expenditures. Most purchases end up being quality of life shifts and if you want to maintain the same quality of life you'll end up buying it again at some point. All my budgets are in $/time. So my car insurance is $xxx/6 months, my laundry is $xxx/week, my food is $xxx/day etc. Then I workout what each expense is costing me per day, per pay period, per month and per year. I get paid biweekly so I have all my trends on Mint setup to track the last 14 days. This way I'm basically doing a 2 week running average of my expenses.

Before I started budgeting I was breaking even every month. Now I'm saving over $1000/month. It was shockingly easy to cut out all the crap I didn't even realize I was spending money on and not drop my quality of life at all.

[jamaicabound]

I'd heard about this website but never checked it out until I saw this thread. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Just signed up, really cool tool, helps with budgeting which is somethign I've never really taken the time to sit down and do myself really. I got all my accounts hooked up but having trouble scottrade doesn't seem to want to connect. Love how it shows you your net worth as well as where you are spending too much money.

[Dr. Howard]

YNAB is crap, why can't they get it off of desktop? Mint works just fine, the bank information is provided by a third party service called Yodlee and they work directly with the banks. They provide bank information to all of the major accounting software companies as well. There isn't a hacking risk but mint collects all of your data for marketing. If you need more power I'd say go with quicken and bill pay, if you need more than that you're probably in the market for a book keeper for your personal finances. ie. your cash flow is in the hundreds of thousands and you have investments in multiple businesses.

I like Dave Ramsey for personal finance advice, he's the author of total money makeover and has a radio program that can be streamed online.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

I'm very big on budgeting, but I don't think budgets are too complicated for an Excel data sheet to handle. I track all of my expenses, income and savings, as well as their composition, full with indicators that light up as things change and goals are reached. I seriously doubt that a cloud service could give me all that in one convenient package.

[jimukr104]

(06-28-2014 04:58 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote:  

I'm very big on budgeting, but I don't think budgets are too complicated for an Excel data sheet to handle. I track all of my expenses, income and savings, as well as their composition, full with indicators that light up as things change and goals are reached. I seriously doubt that a cloud service could give me all that in one convenient package.

I agree...and safer also!

[Caractacus Potts]

Is there any difference between Mint.com and Personal Capital?
https://www.personalcapital.com/

Personal Capital says that they check the fees that you are paying in your 401K and other retirement accounts and show you how much they work out to and the effect that it has on your growth.

Does Mint do this? Has anyone used Personal Capital?

Thanks.

[Cattle Rustler]

Personal capital is for those more oriented in investing while mint is for budgeting. Does personal capital keep track of your expenses like mint?

Mint > personal capital.

[Honorable Man]

I've been using it on my iPad and I absolutely love it. It makes saving money fun and really makes me feel guilty for impulsive spending.

[emuelle1]

I've been using Mint since about 2008, and it's awesome. It used to be an independent service that was bought by Intuit.

Dave Ramsey is pretty good. I listened to his (free one hour) podcast for about 4 years. I got to the point where I felt like I heard everything he had to say, and got tired of how every single day he could make his stupid comment about Twitter "One of our twits will tweet to you" and chuckle like it was the most amusing thing he'd ever heard. I was always amused by some of his callers who seemed to expect him to respond with something like "OK, I get that you haven't worked in 5 years and have been sitting on a relative's couch doing nothing, but you're right; you really need to go out and finance a Hummer."

One poster was looking for other books. Ramit Sethi's "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" is a really good personal finance book. It's the same title as his blog. He talks about automating your finances, which was valuable to me. Every paycheck, 1/26th of all my bills and obligations for the year automatically transfers to another checking account, and every bill that can be automated is. That way I never have to think about them. Then whatever is left I can spend with little worry.

[Ensam]

(04-19-2015 09:12 PM)Caractacus Potts Wrote:  

Is there any difference between Mint.com and Personal Capital?
https://www.personalcapital.com/

Personal Capital says that they check the fees that you are paying in your 401K and other retirement accounts and show you how much they work out to and the effect that it has on your growth.

Does Mint do this? Has anyone used Personal Capital?

Thanks.

I use both. I like the mobile interface of PC better than Mint and the web interface of Mint better than PC. PC has very nice cash flow analysis in their mobile app that isn't available on Mint's app (though you can emulated it over Mint's web interface).

[DJ-Matt]

Love Dave Ramsey.

Here's the breakdown of how it works for me, this is addressing the safety aspect in the OP. I signed up for Mint a few months ago after reading this thread (isn't RVF great?) and added all my accounts.

Depending on how your bank works there are varying levels of security:

- ING Direct/Crapital One 360 has security access codes that can be generated so that Mint gets read-only access. Codes can be revoked if compromised. This is by far the safest way, but not sure how many institutions use it.

- My local bank's online access password is used for Mint's access to my balance, however you cannot really do much with my online banking so if compromised it's probably harmless. Also most banks can tell if you're hitting the site from a different location (IP address) and Mint always uses the same one(s) to access it.

- For my credit card account access by Mint in addition to the password you also need to verify the security question(s) which Mint does not save.

Bottom line, Mint seems to be very safe, and very useful! It's nice to know what you spend on various things, and for those of us who have multiple bank accounts you can see how much money you have all in one place