a cesspool of interwebness

Mint your $$

Posted by Unknown On 2011-02-12 7 comments

A few years back I heard tell of a great free online money management program that integrated with your bank, investments, etc to provide you with an up-to-date picture of your finance. This handy piece of software is called Mint and, I am very pleased to tell you, it is finally available in Canada.

Mint really does make money management easy. Set-up took me about 15 minutes, and that included categorizing some of the more esoteric transactions from my chequing account. Once set up you get the nifty overview screen, seen above, that let's you know how much money you (don't) have and where you stand in relation to your monthly budgets.
Yep, you can set up budgets for practically anything, and Mint will even recommend budgets for you. It recommended, based on our spending patterns the last few months, about $660/month on groceries, which sounds about right for my household.
Mint also gives you handy hints for saving money, like switching to a credit card better suited for my spending habits, and it has already sent me a couple emails reminding me to pay some bills and a warning about the low balance in my chequing account (that one is destined to be there always). I'm still discovering what all Mint can do for me, but first impressions are that I'm pretty damn impressed and I do recommend this free webapp to everyone, and I urge you to get the iPhone/BlackBerry app to go along with it as well.
One caveat to consider: having all your debt and spending habits put on-screen in front of you in a handy pie chart is a sobering moment, but a necessary one towards an end goal of financial security.

7 comments:

ScrewLoose said...

I already use Mint but I wish it could show you your expected future balance based on your bill dates. I loved that feature in Quicken.

That being said Quicken tended to only work for a couple months then fail to update your balances then bitch at you to pay money for the next version.

So Mint it is!

Unknown said...

"esoteric transactions" = porn
"financial security" = myth of a previous generation
;)

Bairen said...

I cry everytime I think of money; If I had more to manage this wuld be atoolforme. Keep me posted though.

Unknown said...

Kyro: Up yours (or, I hate it when you are right), you cynical knob.

Bairen: Using software like this may help you to keep more of the money you are currently shelling out. My family just barely gets by at the moment, what with a four month old baby, unemployed wife and a not small amount of debt. Within seconds of getting my info in Mint it gave me a handy chart showing that I could have saved $100 last month not eating out. It's those little changes that will make the difference in the long run.

pseudoRequiem said...

I'm still hesitating at the "Enter your bank card number and password" screen. I'm over the initial distrust of online use of CCs so maybe I should just get over this...

Selbonaut said...

I felt the same way pseudo, but I looked into the company, and it is owned by Intuit, the same people who make quickbooks and quicktax. It is no different than online banking really.

Unknown said...

Giving this some serious thought.