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I’m interested in the pros and cons AADMM members have had with Mint.
Pros: it’s online (quicken is not); it’s free; it shows accounts across multiple banks, credit cards, loans, etc.; it downloads transactions fast; it shows real time status on line items budgeted (though overall budgeting is sub par in mint); can assign transactions to categories for auto-assigning in the future
Cons: difficult to download date-range transactions; does not give info in checks written; slow to load; arbitrarily stops working when password into between mint and the accounts it’s tracking need to be updated. This can cause massive slowdown in productivity if you aren’t the one with the ability to fix the link between the account(s) and mint. Ads are everywhere.
I only use it to pull transactions and to give clients budgets for single items like Christmas spending.
I hope this is helpful.
I checked it out and had it in mind to use with a client in debt, so we could both see what was going on. The thing I liked the least was that (because it is free) it is constantly shoving credit card offers and other ‘ways to save’ in your face. I did not think it a good tool given the context! Others like YNAB, and I will try that soon. Mint is also weak on the investment tracking side.
Hi,
I personally am not a fan of Mint. I have tried it with clients and then dropped it. Some of my clients who are older in senior living facilities (assisted/independent) were getting overwhelmed with all of the “clutter” email notifications in their inbox, offers on their dashboard/home page, suggestions for how to “save money”, “over budget”, etc… it was just too much. Had to turn the whole thing off for some clients beyond just unsuscribing them from the notifications.So I use Quicken. Much less clutter. And I use the piechart a lot in that I send regular updates to clients (that don’t login to see their finances) to see an update of the spending (week/month/quarter,) etc. So i take a snapshot of the pie chart showing the top level spending categories and send that off. They can see clearly an update of their spending patterns.
I like being able to see transactions for all financial accounts in one place. I think for tech savvy people, it’s a good tool. They also have an app for your phone.
Their budget reporting is pretty good as well for people who want to analyze their spending.
I used to use Mint to log in weekly and make sure there weren’t any unusual charges on any of my accounts. However, I don’t do this anymore because I have all my accounts set up to send me an email for all transactions so I keep on top of it in real time.
I use Mint depending on the client’s needs. The initial setup can be painful, but the dashboard is a useful feature if the client has multiple accounts and just needs better awareness.
Personal Capital is supposed to be stronger on the investment tracking side.
I agree with a previous post that it is much less detailed in terms of analysis for budgeting as compared to quicken. I find that it works well for someone who wants to know what they are generally spending, are savvy with updating passwords, and is willing to understand how the program works. Mint emails clients when they exceed set spending limits or have unusual activity. I do like that aspect of the system.
I’ve been personally using the Mint app on my phone for about 6 months now, primarily to track daily balances in our personal, business, investment, and credit card accounts. I wanted to test it out and it’s been really helpful to me because I can view all together. It saves me a lot of time not having to log individually into our bank, investment, and credit card websites to view transactions and payment due dates, etc. The “bills due” dashboard is good when logged into mint.com on the desktop. By setting alerts, I am notified (phone app, email) when certain account balances drop below any threshold I set. This feature alone has really helped me prevent overdraft charges on several occasions when I needed to get a check deposited to our personal account from our business (not allowed to online transfer between accounts with our bank). Sometimes the sync breaks down and you need to re-enter or confirm certain security answers to restore the sync. But I find this happens with just about all of these account-aggregating programs.
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