For being a rather brainy guy who is generally good with numbers, I’m fairly lackadaisical when it comes to my finances. It’s not a matter of capability (as I’ve had witness with other folks). It’s likely more a matter of interest, as the twists and turns of my personal finances just don’t get me all that excited. Sure, I keep up with all the basic info – bank balances, 401k performance, online bills, loan status – but have little stirring in my heart to really be pro-active with my finances. I’m much more reactive and wait for events to occur (and deal with them) before really anticipating something ahead of time.
Thus, I’ve never really gotten into the usual financial software systems – ala Quicken and Microsoft Money – to put all my finances into a single program. They always seemed like such a tremendous duplication of effort for little real value. As banks moved heavily online over the last 10 years, there is little need to keep a separate recording system. Plus, I rarely carry/spend cash and almost never write a check. I am never in a situation where the online information isn’t properly mapping out my detailed transactions.
Mint.com is a great site for personal money management
But, one of the big drawbacks to online-only view of my financial health is that it is all disjointed. Needing to do a quick financial search results in logging into a large number of differing systems – US Bank, Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Chase, Wells Fargo, ETrade – all with separate user/password information and none of it with consistent looks into the data. I need to keep my password organizer (keepass is my tool of choice) handy for the daily/weekly run around the internet to checkup on things. That sucks. Plus, I’m at a loss to get a well-structured, overall picture of my finances and need to make several mental leaps to visualize whether I am doing okay or bordering on poverty.
Yeah, I could geek-out and go all Microsoft Excel over the whole thing, but that only provides some short-term rewards and quickly becomes out of date.
Being the internet junkie that I am, I’ve been aware of the financial services site called Mint for some time. It offers some very intriguing functionality by connecting directly to the sources of data (in this case, the various banking accounts I normally access independently) and summarizing all of the financial details in one location. It is really the missing element I have when trying to manage my finances. I like that it:
- keeps my data live by going directly to the sources – which means I don’t need to copy information into the system
- provides smart organization systems to the data – so that purchases can come from multiple sources and payments from one account to another are properly classified
- offers a plethora of data visualization systems that span multiple timelines and types of displays
- provides an easy-to-use budgeting system that analyzes your historical purchases to guide on setting future spending plans
- gives useful data immediately upon selecting specific records – providing graphs and summaries that let conclusion be drawn without diving into a separate area
As someone who pays attention to the user experience when browsing, the designers at Mint have done a great job of giving me just the right amount of information and allowing me to self-discover how to do certain functions without a huge learning curve.
Its one drawback is around personal comfort with disclosed information. In order to make this site work for you – you will be providing username and passwords to all of your online banking accounts, so the Mint system can talk directly to pool the data together. Even in the modern age of electronic transactions, there is still something a little unnerving when handing over every security privilege to my financial life to a website with whom I’ve never met or never had firsthand experience using.
That said – I’m glad I took the leap. In using the site for the past month, I have gotten more understanding regarding my financial health than I have ever experienced in my 38 years on this planet. It gives me the right amount of data and gives me the feeling that I not only control my money, but am acutely aware of how it is working both for and against me. The level of functionality is impressive for a free site (they make money by trying to offer you to change various financial services – which is easy to ignore). I would recommend anyone to give it a try.
