I don’t know why i’ve been putting off trying this site out.  Mint.com is, quite simply. the most amazing online service i’ve used in a long time.  It took all of 10 seconds to register and start using the program, it’s mostly an intuitive program to use, I didn’t read any of the help screens at all.

You start off by entering the login details for all your accounts; username, password and, if there are verification questions, the answers for those questions.  This took a while, but after an hour I had all my accounts registered except for my motorcycle loan.  I don’t think this is a mint issue but rather my credit union since the account is listed seperately on their website as well.

Once all your accounts are entered you can go to the overview page where you can see all your income and all your debts.  It even has an area for investments so I entered my sharebuilder account too!

Here you can also setup your budget.  The cool thing here is mint goes through all your accounts and finds what you spent whether it’s on your bank debit card, discover card or whatever.  Mint pulled out all my gas charges even though they were on 3 different cards, seriously cool!

There’s a page for transactions, where you can see how your money is being spent and a page for trends where you can check your spending over the last year, you can even filter by merchant!  so I was able to see exactly how much I spent at Home Depot this year for example.

The investments page tracks your investments, showing activity trends and what not.  A nice feature too.

There is a savings page where you can enter your credit score and the site will search for deals for you, I haven’t really looked into this yet but I will soon.

Now, there’s one more thing I should mention.  There is an alert feature that will send you an email or text message to your cell phone when you exceed your budget in any category, food for example.  It will even alert you when a bill is due soon.  This is exactly what I needed, no more missed payments! woohoo!!

With all these good features the program does have some annoyances.  When you login you need to ‘refresh’ your accounts so it has up to date information.  This can take a while if you have lots of accounts or a slow connection.  Also, if you try to drill down thru transactions for a particular account and you’ve been logged in for a you’ve probably been auto-logged out by the bank already, another refresh is in order.

All in all this is a fantastic service and I would be happy to pay 10 or 20 bucks a month for it.  I carefully watched the little ‘lock’ in my browser to make sure everything is being encrypted and it looked good.  I highly recommend this especially if you have lots of accounts and/or miss payments occasionally.

Anyone else using this?  any ideas or tricks/tips to share?

P.S.  I just noticed they program even shows the APY on my ING savings account, sweet!

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