Not to be confused with Mint Mobile. Mint.com is a part of the Intuit family, the same people who run Turbo Tax. Now I’ll state upfront, yes that is a link. No I am in no way part of any referral or affiliate program they might have. I just like the app. Because… it’s free.
There will be an incoming post reviewing some of the biggest names in budgeting apps, but I want to really dig into them and see how they work before I write. I’m covering Mint today because it’s free and because I am very familiar with it, having used it for years.
The Pros:
- It’s free. Yes there are some paid services available, but I’ve never touched them.
- You can link all your accounts and let the app do the tracking. No more papers and papers keeping up with paystubs and receipts!
- You have the opportunity to set budgets and goals, complete with rolling balances for things that don’t pay every month, say your yearly HOA dues. (Blech.)
- It has a way to track your credit score as part of the site.
- It can easily calculate your net worth for you.
- If you’re a charts and graphs person, you’re in luck. It’s possible to load up graphs that show how much of your spending is going to one thing, say Food.
- If you overspend your budget, it will flag it in the Budgets section. But also if you spend way more on something than normal, it will notify you of this difference.
The Cons:
- Getting all your sign in credentials set up can take a while.
- You are moderately vulnerable storing all your financial credentials on their website. Assuming you connect them all. If there’s ever a breach, it could be bad.
- Their transaction sorter seems to have developed a stubborn streak that wasn’t around at first. Sometimes it mistakes your shopping at Walmart for Home Goods, when they’re really groceries. It’s easy enough to edit.
- Speaking of editing, part of that stubborn streak is that it’s been really bad of late remembering rules you’ve set like “always flag Walmart as Groceries.” So you’ll have to go in manually and change it. Every. Month.
- There’s not really any sort of function in place to have it automatically account for deviations in your spending, say Christmas shopping or restaurants on vacation. You’ll pretty much have to do that manually.
- You’ll want to check how much money is left at the end of your month on the last day of the month. Once it rolls over, you won’t see it on the Budgets page.
Conclusion:
Is Mint perfect? Mmm no. Is it pretty okay? Yeah it is. Mild annoyances, but nothing I haven’t learned to work around. It helps to remember that it’s free. And well, you get what you pay for. But if you’re super tight and need help making your tracking easier so you can stay on budget? Mint might be the way to go for you.
