Mint.com online money management tool
I have watched this website closely for when they would actually release this tool. If you have time go check out Mint.com if you’re curious about their new free online money management tool. I’ll give my experience thus far and probably provide a follow up in a month to see how it is working for me. My backup plan is to continue to keep my Excel spreadsheets updated of course.
Signed up an account and after logon I was taken to the tab to add Accounts. So far I have 8 of them in there and the tool creates a secure connection and gathers your transactions. Then I went to my Overview tab to view the summary. There is a getting started area that lets you see how you could save money (for products they probably endorse which is how they make money), setup alerts to track bill due dates, or look at spending trends. So far so good.
After all the initial setup, I clicked the Transactions tab which basically lumps all your accounts into one big pool. A lot of my transactions have no category and there is some updating that has to be done to teach it what those transactions are for. You can filter the view based on the account you want to look at though, which helps since I track regular transactions on my checking account. Spending Trends tab shows me a neat pie graph of the amounts and percentage of my available cash is being spent in different categories.
Finally their Ways to Save tab is where they make the money through this tool. It suggested I transfer my balance from my 9.9% APR card to a 13% card with a cash back bonus of $110. I think I’ll just avoid the extra finance charges by not doing this. I probably won’t use this tab but I understand why they have put it in there. Overall I think this tool is neat and we’ll see how it goes for a month.
Does it pull account information online like Quicken/Money? I know that many banks will hit you with a fee if you do this, does that not apply here?
Chris, I use Money and I download my account information from all of my credit cards and my bank into Money. I have never been charged a fee to do this and I don’t understand why they would…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article , but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
kellie, I looked into Money with Wells Fargo a few years ago and the terms on the bank’s site said there would be a monthly access fee. Maybe this is no longer correct or I was somehow mistaken.
Chris,
I don’t bank with Wells Fargo, however, I quickly checked their web site. What it looks like to me is you pay $3.00 a month for online banking through Microsoft Money. What I am understanding is instead of logging into your bank account you would solely be logging into your Microsoft Money and accessing all your banking information through Microsoft Money and not your bank account.
You should still be able to log into your bank account and download your transactions into Microsoft Money free of charge. I watched a little online banking demo they have and it looks like this is possible. From what I could gather if you go to look at your Account Activity there is a link that says “Download Account Activity” this is where you would download the data for Microsoft Money. Usually a pop up box will ask what file format you want to download the data in, I usually select the qif format. Then once downloaded another pop up box will ask what program you want to open the data up in, select your Money program. Once in Money it will ask what account you want to open the data up in, select the appropriate account.
Hope that clarifies it for you.
i signed up and it really is sobering having all of your accounts pooled together. unfortunately, my bank isn’t listed there. that is the same reason i couldn’t use ms money very much.
Probably the tools of the kind are really good and useful but I prefer to manage my own finances myself. One mistake in calculation and everything will go wrong.