The Grumpstump

I have had the privilege to beta test a new site called Mint over the last couple of weeks and I can say that it’s nothing short of Amazing. Everything Mvelopes doesn’t do, Mint does. I’ll write a comparison article for the two platforms later so let’s talk about Mint right now.

Mint is a personal Financial management tool that will track all of your spending for you from every bank account or credit card that you have. After it collects all of the transactions, Mint creates some super impressive charts, graphs, and data for those of us who are number nerds.

For those that aren’t as nerd inclined, they will still be able to appreciated the ‘Deals’ section of Mint. Mint automagically determines your interest rates, bank fees, etc. and compares them to other offers they have exclusive access to in order to tell you when, for example, there’s a 0% APR balance credit transfer card out there that could help you reduce your rate. Mint even calculates your projected savings over the next 12 months from the current offer.

Screenshots (click to enlarge):

Spending Trends Ways to Save Dashboard/Overview

Adding accounts to Mint is the easiest I’ve found. The interface was even easier to use than Mvelopes set-up wise. They have more security and encryption on this site than a lot of banks do it looks like, so I wasn’t concerned with security.

Minor Gripes

No way to add Brokerage, Mortgage, or other ‘weird’ money accounts. (They mentioned in the release notes this was coming soon)
No way to separate out business accounts from personal accounts. (also coming soon)

No way to set spending goals and then measure progress against those goals. (if they had this then I would probably drop Mvelopes and do all of my budgeting with Mint.)

Overall, Mint is a Home Run Waiting to Happen. Shoemoney agrees with me, he previewed Mint at the TechCrunch40 conference going on right now.

Oh yea, the best part…. it’s free!

/grump