Alan’s Take On Mint.com
Just a little while ago, Mint.com officially launched in Canada. Originally only in the United States, Mint.com is a finance tracking service offered to consumers that have a hard time manually tracking their income, expenses, and budgets. They do this by associating your Mint.com account with your bank accounts, your credit card accounts, and your loans and debts. They then take each individual transaction (income, expense), label it to the best of their knowledge, and start outlining a budget. You can also read an interview Tom did with Aaron Patzer about the Mint launch in Canada. Over the last week, I signed up for Mint and have played around with their website. Here’s how I found their service.
Pros
If you’ve ever taken the time to go over a month of expenses, and manually write down and track each individual purchase, then you know that it can be a daunting task, especially when there is more than one person involved. Recently, my wife and I sat down to look over the last few months worth of purchases, and that required a fairly high time investment to write out each expenses, categorize it, and calculate the total cost per month. Using Mint.com, this same work was done relatively accurately within minutes, and flawlessly within half an hour. It can be a huge time saver.
The service is very easy to setup. It simply asks you to find your bank, then give your login details. Then find your credit card, and add your login details. Done deal, the basics are setup, and you are good to go. It pulls your transactions and starts to track them. Of course, you can spend more time establishing budgets or going over each individual transaction, making sure that they are accurate, but again this isn’t a hard thing to do. It’s very natural and intuitive.
Mint.com has the ability to alert you if you overspend on a particular budget. It comes with standard budget areas like Groceries and Mortgage, so if you spend over what you are allotting for the month, Mint.com will email you and let you know – a handy service if you split purchases between two or more family members.
Mint also has a free iPhone app, one that is not as detailed as their web service, but is perfect for on-the-go checking of bank account balances or quickly settling budget disputes. Again, very quick and easy to set up, and smooth and intuitive once up and running.
Cons
By far, the biggest one for me, is that they didn’t have the ability to add my British Columbia and National Student Loans. These represent the majority of my debt, so being able to track them in terms of net worth is huge. This is something that I am sure a lot of Canadians have, and it is unfortunate that they do not have access to the system just yet.
Sometimes the service mislabels transactions. It looked like we had spent a lot of money on alcohol in November, but in reality Mint.com just mislabelled our fuel purchases from a “gas bar” as alcohol, not transportation costs. However, once I recognized the error, it was a quick fix.
Finally, you have the option of adding assets, like a vehicle or real estate. However, there is no objective way of finding its worth – Mint just asks you, and you tell it. Without doing outside research into the value of an asset, you are basically just guessing how much something is worth. My vehicle, for example, could be worth anywhere from $8000 or $12000, and I honestly have no way of knowing unless I attempted to sell the vehicle. Furthermore, its value is constantly depreciating, so if I put in a value (say, $12,000), then the accuracy of the value is constantly changing and becoming less and less accurate. I’m not sure if I am doing something wrong or if that is just the nature of the beast. Regardless, it offers the potential of artificially inflating your net worth.
Conclusion
Mint.com is definitely worth using – especially if you enjoying having a “hands off” approach to your finances. While I haven’t yet had time to fully explore all of Mint’s features and options, I can definitely say that it will become a part of my personal finances. Instead of going to two or three different websites to get a quick picture of my finances, I can quickly go to Mint.com and get an accurate estimate of my financial health.
Mint.com Canadian Review,
thanks for the heads up, I use mint and have a few trading buddies up in Canada that would find it useful.
I have read many reviews on mint.com now. One thing I find is not covered is concerns about security. By adding ALL of your login credentials to a single site I feel you are leaving yourself open to an awful lot of risk. If mint.com gets hacked, your entire financial world is exposed.
We’ll stick to our spreadsheets hidden deep beneath password encryption and network firewalls.
I totally agree. I was in the process of opening an account when I got to the point where they asked me about my bank user name and password. I aborted the process right away. I talked about this with a buddy and we both feel uncomfortable about it. Like you said, we’re exposed if Mint gets hacked. Even if they don’t, how much trust do you put on their employees? Also, whatever happened to banks requiring you to not share your password with anyone? In the end, I think the risks outweigh the benefits.
My main concern was also safety. I don’t like the idea of it having access to my accounts. I love the concept, but the idea of giving out such personal information makes me uncomfortable.
Me too, I worry about 3rd party issues and marketing schemes and who really gets access to my financials.
It’s a great idea but as mentioned security does seem like something i’d be a little skeptical about when putting all my financial information trust into a website.
I think another interesting question (asked on the Mint forums but never answered) is where they store your data (including passwords & transactions). If they’re stored in Canada then Canadian laws apply, if they’re stored in another country (like the USA) then their national laws apply (like the Patriot Act) which could differ significantly from you’re used to in Canada!
Read their terms and conditions. It is stored in California. You are also giving up your right to trial by jury – which is illegal and nullifies the whole agreement. I would not recommend them at all based on their terms and conditions.
i’m not worried about security concerns at all. all login information is encrypted. even if someone breaks in and steals all the databases, it’ll take them what, like 50 years straight computing time to get our passwords out? mint will announce that they were breached and you can change all your passwords.
Surely the passwords you tape to your keyboards/monitors should be of more concern….
That said, my biggest beef with Mint is that they axed one of the best features from Quicken Online (quicken bought mint a year or so ago). You used to be able to input all of your monthly bills and income sources and then forecast your bank balance for the next month or so. This was of huge benefit so that you could identify any trouble ahead of time and move money around accordingly. It also let you see how much you could overpay your credit card without coming up short on your mortgage, etc.
You should try CalendarBudget if you want to be able to forecast your account balances and future transactions. No automated data pull from your bank, but it can import your data – give you great flexibility for planning your money, not simply reacting to whats happened.
Hi everybody, Geoff here from the Mint team in Canada.
Alan – thanks for the review. A couple follow ups: We’re adding banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions on a regular basis and you can make requests from within your account. I’ll check with our team about the status ofstudent loans.
Transactions naming accuracy is pretty solid and continually improving al the time. Interestingly, the recent increase in the number of Canadians using Mint has also improved our accuracy percentage in the US…lots of Canadians taking advantage of the strong dollar and buying down south.
Assets: as Aaron noted in his interview with Tom (the one you linked to) “US Mint users who have added their home address see a Zillow home value estimate, and can accept the Zillow estimate or enter their own estimated home value. As of today, Canadian Mint users can enter their estimated home value. Again, as we did in the US, we’ve launched in Canada with a core set of features, and will add more. We’ll alert our users as we add more Canadian features in the coming months.”
There were a few comments centered on security. Mint is locked down. You can find quite a bit of info on the http://www.mint.com/privacy/ page, and we addressed a number of other specific questions in Jody White’s recent Moneysense blog here: http://www.moneysense.ca/2010/11/12/i-love-budgeting-no-seriously/.
Cheers,
g
Then why do you ask users to give up a constitutional right in your terms and agreements? Maybe because your service is not as secure as you profess and when poo has a moment with fan you can feel covered?
Thanks for the information. You really had me chuckling at the November drinking bill mishap.
I”ve been tinkering around with mint in the past few days, and set up a “budget” which was easy enough to do.
I find that their prompts for you to “save money” by using their recommended institutions are kind of annoying.
I also was dismayed because there is no Questrade on Mint.
I also agree that the things are kind of mislabelled sometimes- like I was charged for a monthly fee for my bank (but then it was deducted) and Mint perceives that I am getting charged a monthly fee and it recommends other institutions that don’t charge a monthly fee.
I’m also somewhat concerned about the security, but loved seeing my spending some up on the website.
Although it doesn’t always categorize things the way I want, I do like how I’m able to go in and change it, which keeps me looking at my transactions and still having to pay attention to them– but saves me way more time than entering it into Excel!
My friend had trouble logging on though and getting her BMO account linked up, and we’re not sure why…anyone else experience this?
They still have problem with BMO bank Account. I’m still waiting for the fix.
Mint.com is terrible. I never could get any of my banking information to be added and I kept getting error messages.
I was never a fan of Quicken and I am not a fan of Mint and will never try it again.
I got all my various accounts set up in less than 10 minutes. I am a retired financial advisor and absolutely love it but have only used it for about an hour so far. I too am concerned about the security but I am comfortable with their security levels, policies, etc. There was a time when no one would use debit cards and credit cards and only wanted to go to a bank. There was a time when no one would shop online. There was a time when people wouldn’t use their computer to do online banking. I doubt the people who say they won’t use Mint.com here go without online banking, without debit cards, without credit cards, without online shopping, etc. Do you really think your personal home wi-fi security and your $750 computer and online shopping website has a higher level of security than Intuit’s? Are you qualified to make that assessment? What about the guy at the gas station who is going inside to swipe your credit card? Are you sure he isn’t swiping it through a card reader? What about when you go to the bank? Are you sure you aren’t being watched via a pin-hole camera that can see your PIN, etc.?
I am looking for an online budgeting program, and the options have narrowed down to Mint, or Quicken. Does anybody have some insight into the differences between these programs? Can Quicken access all the same bank information? Canada Student Loans are another one that need to be included. Any information would be much appreciated! Thank you
After feeling confident that mint.com is a secure site, I recently opened up an account. Many many pro’s to this program. Yes there are sometimes mistakes with the categories, but this is a very easy fix, and forces you to keep tabs on your transactions. My only big con with this program is that is does not take into account a running balance. The “everything else” option at the bottom of the Budget page just isnt’t enough, and there should be a way of reviewing your balance without setting budget categories. This seems to be the number one complaint so far with other users as well, and hopefully this issue will be resolved soon.
I’m interested in using mint to track my investments. Does anyone know when the investment part of mint will be launched here in Canada?
I would stay clear of Mint. Absolute nightmare in the UK and real mixed track record. Could be far better.
For those looking for financial tracking software, what about MS Money Sunset for free? MS has discontinued it, but provides the sunset version at no charge: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=20738
has anyone had any privacy issues with Mint.com? What do they do with your information – I know it’s free, so they must get something out of it. Anyone know what?
I used Mint primary because “It pulls your transactions and starts to track them” and really that is what mint is supposed to be all about because it is not a budgeting tool nor is it able to predict cash flow, ..etc. But guess what !!! after using the software for 1 year now and was completely confident that it pulls all my transactions from my bank accounts, i found out that IT DOES NOT!! I was devastated because I based all my tax returns, budgeting .. etc on the transaction on Mint. I went to Mint user online form and found out that this is a common problem and Mint claims to be working on it. I contacted Mint and pointed them out to the problem ( which was i was missing out 1 month of transactions ) and after 4 emails back and forth in which I have answered all questions asked and gave them enough proof of the error they could not find a solution to it and stopped communicating with me all together!! So bottom line, It Is Not A Reliable Software.. you will be keeping your books based on incomplete financial info and after all its free .. so you really have no where to go when problems happen and they can not resolve it .. Sad to say but, I would recommend against using Mint!!
I would LOVE to be able to use Mint.com but the issue in Canada is one of “liability.”
If your BANK got hacked and your account had money stolen, your bank would be liable. If your bank found out you used Mint.com, they have grounds to deny covering the stolen funds, regardless of whether or not Mint.com had anything to do with the theft.
Until Canadian banks accept Mint.com and change their terms and conditions of use to reflect that, you are giving up a large measure of safety.
Excellent. After reading all this thread, indeed you came up with the most convincing word. Liability to Mint!
Furthering what “Pete” mentioned above, Microsoft Money Sunset Plus is free to download.
It will do what Mint.com does and much more, albeit with a bit more user interaction.
I tried mint.com. I setup one credit card and got an email warning from my credit card company that my account had been compromised. I deleted my account right away.
Generally, credit card companies do not email their customers. Mint.com is a 3rd party website that pulls info electronically and securely from the various financial institutions that you have accounts at. When Mint.com pulls info. (to update your info at Mint.com) credit card/financial institutions sometimes recognize it as a breach of security. If you picked up the phone and called your credit card company, they would be able to tell you that it was Mint.com. It is just a precaution issued by the credit card company. The same happened to me when I first set it up, I got alarmed at first and then I realized it was just Mint.com.