Mint.com, a new free personal finance management site, is easy to get started, though we’re not sure we’re completely satisfied with where we end up.
To begin, just enter in the user names and passwords for your online banking accounts. The site is easily understood and instantly navigable.
It synced effortlessly with all our accounts, loading all our transactions in under a minute. Within minutes, we were looking at pie charts of our spending habits broken down by type and shown over time. Neat.
What would really take this service up a notch is if it allowed you to transfer funds between accounts. I would love to be able to pay off credit card from my checking out by only logging into one website.
One drawback is that because my bank doesn’t communicate who the merchant was on a paper check, a good number of my bill payment transactions fall outside Mint’s system.
Our credit card APR was incorrectly listed as 0%, and then told us we could save a grand by switching to Capital One. No thanks.
Lastly, many have raised questions privacy and security concerns, including the insecurity of handing over your banking and account passwords to a third party, as well as the technical method for how Mint executes transactions. If these thoughts make you squeamish, check out Mint’s security practices.
Overall, Mint seems like a great way to get a quick snapshot of your overall personal finances. For people with multiple credit cards and no experience with setting up a budget, it could be quite a boon. But for us, the lack of bank to bank transfers, no detailed recording of check-based transactions, and the lack of interface with brokerage accounts, means we won’t be giving up our simple, powerful, and infinitely customizable personal excel sheet budget for Mint.com anytime soon.
PREVIOUSLY: Mint.com – A New Free Personal Finance Management Site
Sounds like one stop shopping for total identity theft. Lots of comments on here fussing about hacking and security from the outside. Another concern is the disgruntled or careless employee intentionally or accidentally compromising security. I’d guess a devious pissed off ex employee could make quite a bit selling a huge database of banking and credit card login information. I too am surprised Consumerist isn’t dumping all over the very notion of providing some online startup with ALL you banking logins.
I said this the very first time I heard about Mint. The people who sit on the board are well-connected in the silicon valley VC community. They’ll keep getting good press and winning ad-hoc awards because of who they know.
Never underestimate the power of the Apple strategy: You can go to market with an inferior product, as long as people are fairly ignorant of their options, and you market your product properly.
Case in point? Yodlee has offered bank-to-bank transfers(the main thing Ben said he wanted) for over a year now. Ben didn’t know that because Yodlee doesn’t have VC friends who can ensure it gets to be a “tech darling”, whatever the hell that means.
I probably should shut up about Yodlee, though, because they probably won’t be able to keep it free if they get too big, and all the Mint people would just clog up the support queue, anyways.
Way to sell out guys.
Yodlee i superior, also security info is here:
[corporate.yodlee.com]
I don’t see all the big fuss. Mint is secure; it says so right on the site. And it uses Yodlee, which says IT’S secure. So that’s two layers of security. My front door has only one layer.
The biggest problem seems to be that it (a) doesn’t work with every bank, and (b) it uses web scraping, which will break every time the bank updates its site.
So I have decided to jump into the ring and compete. Introducing: “Julep”.
I – I mean, Julep – will use manual web surfing, using the latest Internet Explorer 7.0. And I guarantee Julep will work with every single bank web site on the planet. In fact, Julep is even compatible with credit unions that don’t have a banking site; as long as they have a telephone number, Julep will work – work for your money.
And the second best part: It’s completely free. Why only second best? Because:
Julep works by e-mail. That’s right, no complicated “web browsers” or “protocols” to learn. Got a Blackberry? You can use Julep. Got a cell phone with SMS? Julep is for you. Let’s see Mint top THAT.
To get started with Julep, just e-mail your name, social security number, mother’s maiden name, and complete list of your bank account numbers, bank logins, passwords and PINs, as well as an 8×10 B&W glossy photo to: jay@ao.. no, wait, Quentin. Yeah, that’s it. Quentin@aol.com. No, no, wait. Quentin@caymanislands.com. OK. That works.
@Jay Levitt: i don’t think this julep is all it’s cracked up to be. i sent that email & i got a daemon error. or is “daemon error” just the name of the person responding to me? i confused. should i just post my info here?
One security flaw that is not called out well to the consumer is the fact that you are by default set up to receive a summary email. While the email does not contain account numbers, it does contains the names of the financial institutions and the current amounts in these accounts. Email is NOT a secure medium. You can turn this email notification off in preferences but due to the sensitive nature of this data I’m shocked that it was turned on by default. I’ve since canceled my mint.com account.