mint.com

I've been trying out mint.com, a FREE service that consolidates all your financial information in one place. I decided to try it out because I heard that Microsoft Money Plus is not being supported anymore (which I *think* is the feature that lets me update all my transactions into money from my bank, credit cards, etc). I also happened to *just* read about mint.com on a blog I follow called Cool Tools.

So far, I'm really hooked. mint.com was able to find and load ALL of my accounts (15 or so), which I was a little wary about its ability to do. At a glance, I can look at my spending on a pie chart and see my net worth. So far, it has been easy to recategorize expenditures and I had to do NO manual entry for those expenditures. mint.com logs into all your accounts for you and pulls ALL the information into one place. It's just great!! And, a feature I also found very cool was a graph that showed all my investments performance compared to the S&P, Dow or Nasdaq. There seems to several customizations you can do on the information, and although it may not be as comprehensive as Money or Quicken, it is free and the fact that it consolidates all that information for you is better than Money ever was!!

Cons: There have to be a few cons to everything, right? One would be the laborious set-up process. If you are skittish about giving your passwords out, you won't like this. But, it is a necessary evil- in order for it to get all my account info, I had to give it all my passwords. They explain that they don't keep any identifying info on you to link any of your account info. And if anyone were to get your mint.com account info, it would just be a read-only view of the amounts, not any account numbers. So, its not for everyone's comfort level, but I went ahead and made the plunge. The most laborious part is that for several accounts, it asks what the security questions/answers you have chosen. That isn't information I necessarily keep written down (although now I've started to, in order to keep it all straight), so that was a pain to go through and get for several accounts (not all required that). Other than that, the only other gripe I have is that it is slow loading the graphs and information. It looks like a nice design (architecture-wise for a website as well as asthetic- I think their using REST, but I can't tell what technology; possibly Flex), but for all the new-fangled interactive web-design, it still just can't behave like a desktop app. As a programmer, I am impressed at the amount of desktop-ish functionality, but at the same time, get a bit impatient as the screen re-loads, flashes, scrolls without warning, or just plain doesn't work.

With all that said, I'm going to continue to use mint.com and see how it works for me in the coming months. If you have used mint.com or try it out, let me know how it works for you!