A Mint Software Review

How Do You Know Where You Are Going If You Don’t Know Where You Are

One of the biggest changes in managing your finances effectively is knowing how you spend your money.  I do believe it is far more about building good habits and spending less than it is about earning more. Start with that you can control. Remember every penny saved is two pennies earned. One of the worst things you can do with your money is ignore it. Whether that means not tracking your spending or not making it work for you (e.g. investing).  Read our Mint software review below!

One of the tools I use is Mint which is a FREE online personal service where you can easily manage all your finances in one place.  Far past the days of tools like Quicken and Money are simple, yet powerful software that can not only help you track budgeting and spending, but offers great features that easy to use.

Mint Software Review: What Is Mint?

Today, mint has over 16+ million users Mint is a personal finance program that is web-based. It is free to sign up and offers a friendly user interface. Mint was acquired by Intuit (yes the same company that brought us Quicken and offers TurboTax) in 2009 and is one of the clearly established leaders in the industry.  Mint offers 256-bit encryption and all of the data exchanged with Mint is encrypted with 128-bit SSL. They have strong relationships with many financial institutions (over 20,000 in the U.S.) and offers integration with many of them, most of which are easy to set up and maintain.

Mint Software Review: What Does Mint Offer?

Today Mint allows you to manage all of your finances in one place. It is great for both the a personal finance newbie thru looking to simply track household expenses or create a budget or even tracking your credit score. Mint also offers intuitive tools & features to support advanced financial planners  who wants to use it for viewing financial information, basic investing or setting up long-term financial goals. Here is a quick overview of each of their core features

Mint Software Review: Budgeting & Tracking Expenses

Mint’s primary features are designed for budgeting and tracking expenses and those services really stand out. Budgeting is easy to set up – connect and synchronize your accounts, download your transactions, categorized into pre-defined categories (which you can customize thru sub-categories). You also have the ability to edit/modify your transactions after the fact and will take time to learn about your spending habits and will become more accurate at assigning the correct categories

Monitoring Credit Scores

Mint has since rolled out free credit score tracking, which makes tracking your complete financial picture easy. It also includes additional details about your credit score, age of credit accounts, payment history and other handy features. More recently, they now offer tips to help you improve your credit score.

Creating & Setting Goals

Another great feature is goal tracking. Mint allows you to set new goals – saving for an education, building an emergency fund, paying off your credit cards or even your next home. Managing goals are simple to set up and easily integrated into the user interface.

Tracking Net Worth

With Mint’s powerful software and integration with so many financial institutions it becomes a powerful tool to examine income, spending and tracking net worth across all types of assets and debts (cars, homes, loans, mortgages, etc.) Net worth is an important part of effective personal finance and Mint is a great tool to get you started and track your performance and trajectory.

Manage Alerts

Mint allows you to stay on top of your finances with alerts and notifications (email or directly in the app). They will notify you of late fees, spending habits or unusual charges. Mint even notifies you when you are spending and exceeding budgets. Also, Mint helps you see what bills are due (and when they are due) and provides you a weekly comprehensive summary.

Mint Software Review: How Do I Access Mint?

Download the app or access directly thru https://mint.com. Mint offers complete access to your financial data through both its website and your favorite mobile device. The service currently available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Mint offers great accessibility though both platforms and like most apps offers TouchID allowing quick access. More recently, Mint released MintSights and gave the app experience a fresh, new look. MintSights made it even easier to stay on top of your expenses, savings and budgeting. The latest update creates a new, more intimate relationship with your money, making it even easier to look at cashflow. This includes cash, credit/debt and net worth as well as your credit score all within one centralized place.

In addition, you have all of the power and flexibility in their web-based version, It offers even more flexibly on setting up and configuring accounts, reviewing information about your budgets, expenses and goals you have set up and configured. Mint is an easy to use, highly flexible interface that provides strong data security and powerful tools.

Mint Software Review: Final Thoughts & Summary

Personally, I am a big fan of Mint and have used it over the last 7+ years. It has helped immensely in many of the areas I highlighted above. Together, we are far more adept and budgeting, tracking expenses understanding our net worth and tracking progress towards our long-term goals. Mint is the first tool I use on Saturday morning when doing my weekly budget reviews. In addition, it has been great to take the journey. They continue to improve their features set and improving integration. There are still other needs that are not yet met (e.g. lack of investing features, synchronization issues, bill pay, etc.) but nonetheless the pros outweigh the cons and find it well worth the time.  Remember, it’s not about earning more, it’s about spending less.

Remember that life is a game never won or lost, only played.