I have a number of accounts at various financial institutions, and managing them was becoming a bit unwieldy. Last month i decided to use Mint.com, I had tried using quicken, MS Money before both of them were not satisfactory. I had:

• 2 Checking accounts at two different bank accounts.
  
• One savings account.
  
• 3 credit card with two different financial institutions.
• Auto loan.
• Investment/Brokerage account.
  
• A 401k at one place.
• An IRA at another.
• A Health Savings Bank Account.

Yikes! The thing is, they all made sense for various reasons, and to try to move them all to one place would have meant sacrificing something worthwhile (whether rate of return with the savings, a great cashback rewards plan with the credit card, or very convenient locations with the bank).

Enter mint.com. With a (free) account at mint we can now look at all of our info in one place.

[Quick note: No, I'm not being compensated for this post in any way.]

Mint automatically pulls information from all of our different accounts, so there’s no need for us to update anything manually. (My previous system was to keep it all in a manually-updated spreadsheet. It got to be a bit of a pain in the neck!)

So that’s why I created an account. And it completely solved the problem. After having an account for a while though, I realized something else it does for me:

It tracks spending very nicely.

For anybody who tracks their spending, Mint is absolutely awesome. It automatically tallies up how much you spend each month with every individual vendor. What I find more useful, however, is the way that it groups vendors to give us information as to how much we’re spending in various categories. Then it gives us nice, pretty charts. Like this:

What’s more helpful for me, however, is the ability to look at trends over time. For example, you can look at changes in your monthly grocery expenditures:

(The November number is artificially low because it only includes data for a portion of the month.)

One thing I’d advise, however, is checking how mint categorizes each of the vendors with which you spend money. It gets most of them right, but probably 1/15 categorizations will be completely incorrect. (For example, it placed our dental insurance payment in the “entertainment: sports” category.) Luckily, changing the categorization of a vendor (or creating entirely new spending categories) is quite easy.

Security concerns?

I’ve heard a few people voice concerns about security with online systems like this. Rather than try to answer them myself, I’ll just point you to this video from the CEO of mint. (It covered all the concerns I had, as well as some others.)

In short

• Mint lets me see all our accounts in one place.
• Mint tracks our spending for us, making it easy to spot trends.
• It’s costs me nothing, and they don’t send me any spam.

And there have been studies that prove that after you use Mint.com, you actually end up saving money by understanding where you are overspending. Even though this article says that average US users who use Mint are the younger and more tech savvy crowd, it goes on to prove that people are actually saving money. External link