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Mint can help you stay on top of your finances and track what you’re spending — but some users report that it doesn’t always work as seamlessly as advertised.
Mint is a free personal finance management service by Intuit available in the US and Canada. It aims to help users keep track of their budgets, create and achieve goals, and aggregate financial accounts on one user-friendly dashboard.
You can use the app or the online platform to:
Sign up for Mint using the steps below:
After you sync your financial accounts, Mint will begin importing data and categorizing expenses.
Mint is free to download and free to use.
Mint uses bank-level security and SSL encryption to protect your data. Mint is verified by VeriSign and also uses multi-factor authentication. That means that you’ll get alerts if changes are made to your account, and you may need to confirm your identity with a code sent via text message or email if there’s any suspicious activity on your account.
Your account’s usernames and passwords are encrypted and stored in a separate database, and if your mobile device or laptop is ever stolen, you can delete your account information remotely.
That being said, no software can guarantee complete invulnerability. To keep your information safe:
Pros
Cons
In the past, I’ve tried manually recording my purchases — and you can just guess how well that worked out. Mint is incredibly useful because it tracks my expenses automatically. I always know how much I’ve spent so far in the month. And after the month ends, I can see how much money entered and left my accounts.
The best part about Mint is it helps me know precisely what my financial snapshot looks like. I don’t have to guess when creating my monthly budgets. More importantly, I can’t delude myself into thinking I spent less than I really did. You know what they say: numbers don’t lie.
Of the many things I love about the Mint app is that by connecting all my accounts, I can see a snapshot of all my finances in one place.
I love that I can search my transactions, but I wish that the automatic labeling was smarter. Sometimes transactions end up in weird places — like “parking” ending up in “fast food” — even when the memo contains clear keywords. It makes for a bit of homework to re-categorize transactions, which I don’t often do.
I don’t love the sensitive alerts. And email alerts are triggered only when I log in, so every time I log in I can expect 5 to 10 emails telling me I have “unusual spending” in a variety of categories. I’m assuming the trigger is some threshold of spending above the budget I’ve set, because it looks like I’m unusual regularly, based on having 24 alerts telling me so. Looks like more homework to update that budget.
Also, the offers are prevalent and could be smarter – even though grocery is not my highest spending category, I keep getting pushed an American Express card with cash back at supermarkets.
Overall, it serves its purpose, which is helping me to understand where I’m spending too much and tracking my overall balances across multiple accounts. If I wanted to deeply analyze my spending habits and areas to cut back in, I might turn to a different tool to help.
The Mint app can be a very useful budgeting tool to help you manage your spending, multiple accounts, and help you find ways to save. If you don’t mind targeted ads and staying on top of categorizing your expenses, this may be the perfect tool for you.
If you want a budgeting app that doesn’t connect to your financial accounts, you’ll want to keep looking. Learn more about creating a budget to make sure you find an app that meets your needs.