Are Seven

Nutshell: Mint, an online financial management tool, is everything Quicken should be, and more…if you can get over the privacy concerns.

Last summer, in a fit of productivity, I decided to give Quicken a try to get my financial life in perspective, if not in full order. Like 95% (estimated) of all people who get Quicken, I used it for a few weeks, before the difficulty of keeping up with it became too much of a pain, and it sat unused in my applications. True, you could automatically import data from your financial institutions, but most of them charged a ridiculous monthly fee to do so. The only way I could get around it was to go in and tag each and every credit card transaction, and I don’t have that kind of time. No, wait…I have that kind of time; just not that kind of patience.

I was interested to see that people in the tech world were talking positively about Mint, an online version of Quicken. Like pretty much everyone else, my first reaction was somewhere along the lines of “no way in hell”. That was also my second through forty-fifth reactions as well. Plug in your usernames and passwords to all your financial institutions in one place? Seemed like the quick road to identity theft, and I prefer my identity to be my own and no one else’s. I’m selfish like that.

But my curiosity got the better of me (as it always does) and I went and took a look at Mint. Their privacy statements are comprehensive to say the least. They obviously realize that asking people to plug in their financial data is going to make people skittish, and they addressed that really well. Plus, I started to realize that, while Mint may compile the numbers, it’s really not that much of a leap from having any of your financial data available online. That is, if you’re worried about identity theft from online financial data, you shouldn’t be using online financial management at all: no online banking, no online access to your stocks or retirement plans, etc.

So I dove in.

I love it. What I immediately realized that Mint does that Quicken doesn’t is it just aggregates. It accesses your online accounts and starts storing the data from the day you sign up. Quicken, on the other hand, wants to access your entire financial history, which is why a lot of banks charge for the automatic download of data into Quicken. But I didn’t really care about that. Sure, it’d be nice to have my full history in the software, but I’m fine with just watching it from this day forward.

The interface of Mint is fantastic: smooth, clear graphics that make navigation a snap and comprehension a breeze (and, apparently, provoke the use of cheesy expressions like “snap” and “breeze”). You can create rules for the entries from your bank account so that when, say, “2 Amy’s - Restaurant” shows up as “Amy’s Nails - Hair and Nails”, you can rename it from there on out. You get a great pie chart showing your spending trends (big shock: I spend a lot of money going out to eat) and even a chart that shows your spending habits compared to other people in your city.

Mint makes money in a way that works out to be one of the biggest benefits of the software: companies pay to have your bills, credit cards and bank accounts compared to theirs so that, in a single click, you can see how you can switch services and save money. I even saw that I could save almost $600 a year by switching from one plan in Comcast to another. Something tells me that Comcast wouldn’t call me up to tell me that.

Now I just need to do something about all that money that eating out is costing me…

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