I am trying a new financial program to track my money Mint.com.
Background- I have been waiting for like 5 years for Quicken to develop their new software for Macs. It was supposed to be released last spring. I was a beta tester for them, I thought the product was a flop. I was depressed and sent in my feedback with the other testers.
I kept thinking…wait for it…wait for it….wait for it. Finally, the other day, I decided to go with Mint.com which is free and now owned by Intuit (Quicken) due to a recent buy out.
So I thought I would blog about it here- if you are looking to live on a budget and be more organized with your finances this is for you. Mint is information only- you log in and it downloads all of your information from your bank-accounts, credit cards etc. You then can organize it into the categories of your budget. It is heavily encrypted, and I feel it is safe. I did a thorough check of that before I shared information.
We check our bank accounts daily anyway for hacks-so should you. I am only using my checking account- I am not going to throw in all of my investments etc. into Mint.com. I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, plus I track those separately. No need to have those worked into this equation just yet.
I love all of the colorful graphs, and knowing exactly how much money I have to spend on each category, We have discussed my obsession with spreadsheets and accounting in the past. I like to know exactly how much I have to spend and how much to save.
Downfall of program- based on a monthly budget and I like to use a bi-weekly budget, but it still covers my bases and will keep me organized.
So give a look at it- I think you will be happy with the ease and convenience of it! So far I am thrilled and most of the Mint community is as well.
I would love to hear what you are using-leave a comment!
Awareness is power!
2 Comments
October 22, 2009 at 8:15 am
Thanks Angela, I will have to check that out. In these hard times, every way we can keep ourselves on track financially is worth looking at. I’ve only got one child so far, but he is definitely having an impact on our bottom line!
I was curious, can you be more specific of the security features that convinced you this was safe? I’m leery of letting an online program have access to my bank account…although now that I think about, that’s what Paypal does. Anyway, thoughts?
October 22, 2009 at 4:21 pm
We used quicken online for a while and it just didn’t do what I wanted. We talked about mint, but I can’t remember why we tried quicken instead. But now my husband and I worked together on a spreadsheet in google documents to track our expenses and goals. We’ve worked on it here and there a few months and it works great for us. It’s all color coded and I have space for upcoming expenses to plan and adjust our budget accordingly. We really like it, and in the morning we get on google chat and both open our shared spreadsheet and we can see each other working on it and we can chat about it instantly. Its awesome!