![]() ![]() The investment tracking has been full of bugs for years now, but the spending tracking was pretty solid until about a year ago. Based on this experience, I would never actually buy anything from Quicken (too bad, I used to use Quicken products and liked them but their mishandling of Mint is a huge PR failure). So, decent for tracking spending, absolute garbage for investments. Read the support message boards before considering. I have one outstanding issue approaching two years now, with then regularly contacting me to say they have fixed it – I check and it is not, so I follow up with more documentation and they reply with the “escalating this up the engineering food chain” message. I have used it for about four years and for nearly that entire time, there have been on-going and recurring bugs in the investments area of the tool, all of which have been reported with screen caps and thorough explanations and the typical support experience ends with someone from Mint responding that they do see the error in the software and have escalated it up the engineering chain. Mint – good for tracking spending, absolutely HORRIBLE for tracking investments.īug-ridden code. (I do link some lesser-used accounts, just to keep an eye on them.) is also owned by Intuit, makers of TurboTax, so they should have some experience in keeping personal data safe. I’m less comfortable giving out my banking information, so I choose not to link my primary bank and investment accounts with Mint. Unauthorized credit card transactions are easily disputed, and these days it seems like online stores are more likely to lose your credit card details anyway. You may be rightfully nervous about sharing your login credentials, but in my opinion your credit card login is not as sensitive as say, a bank login. If want to use this to continuously monitor your spending, I would recommend downloading their smartphone or table apps to make it easier to check in. If you’d like to set a spending target on certain categories like Restaurants or Shopping, then the Mint “Budget” section is nice because it can track your spending against the limits for you and even send an e-mail/text alert if you exceed it. From here, I can edit individual transaction categories, see quickly if something is out of whack, and compare spending across different time periods. That’s where the nifty charts live! I usually start with the “Spending by Category” pie chart. Out of all the top-level sections, I spend most of my time in “Trends”. This cleans up the data and allows me to focus on the spending. I prefer to have Mint ignore all my retirement account contributions, interbank funds transfers, and estimated tax payments. For this, use the “Exclude from Mint” category. There are some things that Mint doesn’t handle that well, or you simply don’t want Mint to track. If I do buy something notable and non-grocery like a $50 faucet fixture or something at Costco, I can always split the transaction into two or more separate categories: (You can also manually enter cash purchases, but simply set all ATM withdrawals to be “Food/Restaurants” by default.) In general, I try to make things fit into just a few simple categories: Food, Auto, Utilities, and Shopping. For example, I always set Sam’s Club and Costco as “Groceries” because that’s mostly what I buy there.Īfter a couple of months, you spend less and less time fixing categories. You can correct the category, and also create a rule that always changes the category to what you prefer. McDonald’s will be “Fast Food”, for example, but it also thought my water company was a clothing store. That’s a lot of time and mental energy saved.Īfter Mint imports your transaction information, it will provide its best guess as to the proper spending category. ![]() The primary advantage of using a service like is that if you pay for things with a linked credit or debit card, then important stuff like the date, merchant, and amount are immediately recorded so you don’t have to do it manually. (I used to be a Yodlee guy, but they’ve been left behind with slow and clunky updates.) For those starting out, here are some practical tips that may be useful. I’ve been using (free, ad-supported) to track our household spending for a while. ![]() That makes it quite hard to know if your spending habits match up with your priorities. While I don’t believe everyone necessarily needs a tracked-down-to-the-dollar budget, I do think a major problem is that many people simply don’t know where their money goes. ![]()
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