Does anyone use Mint.com or are familiar with it? My wife is thinking of using it and...

[Capt. America]

...I wanted to know from a current user and/or someone familiar with it what it is like. Since it is free, I am assuming that they either sell your infromation to marketers or they are trying to sell you financial products. Can anyone help me out? Thank you.

[alc]

1. my wife loves it

She's been using it for a couple of years and can make some pretty impressive lists and charts of our spending. She doesn't do much of the manual manipulation that's possible - just connected it to all of our accounts and it sucks in the details and does a pretty good job of figuring out groceries vs health and fitness vs entertainment, etc. You can itemize your grocery bill to separate food from shampoo and things like that but we don't.

From their privacy policy, they look pretty safe. I work with legal privacy policies for many large corporations and feel good about the one on Mint (i.e. "Simply put, we do not and will not sell or rent your personal information to anyone&quot . It's run by Intuit and I guarantee you they don't want the government on them for doing something that the government claims goes against the stated privacy policy.

I don't know their business model, but I'd guess they can provide very targeted ads - what you recently bought is a better indicator than a recent search.

[madokie]

2. I used to do all that with quicken

Kept track of all our spending for 2 years then looked at where our money was going with a pie chart and we made a few adjustments and haven't looked back. Promptly got rid of the oldsmobile that was costing us 17 bucks a day. That was for payments, insurance, maintenance, it always had problems, if it wasn't one thing it was another. We bought my wife a taurus and she drove it way past it being paid for and never had to spend a dime on it, passed it down to our oldest son and he promptly rounded off every corner it had and finally I told the towing company that hey that thing is yours now.

[paranoid floyd]

3. Sorry, slightly off topic...

But that line "promptly rounded off every corner it had” made me laugh. I remember too many vehicles handed down from older brothers to my younger brother and I got rounded. Not by me. I remember one vehicle – one day he just brought me the cassette deck from it and said, “here’s your half”.

I’m just looking into Mint – looks safe so far for privacy, etc.

[Schema Thing]

4. it's that "connecting to accounts" thing that I can't get comfortable with.

It seems like an awesome concept, and I know they have to have access to your accounts unless you want to key in everything manually.... but man, ONE place having all my account info just scares me too much.


I reeeaaally want to get comfortable with the idea of using MINT. lol, I've been saying this since I first read about it like 6 years ago.

[alc]

5. I agree

It is run by intuit, which is pretty "safe" in the financial area, (compared to a company like facebook or even google which have other goals and less experience). I actually contracted for them in the 90s and they've been doing things like this for a long time - they know the security and regulations and how to protect consumers and financial companies they work with.

But it's a matter of personal comfort. If you aren't comfortable don't do it - the stress will be worse than any help it gives. I would not have done it if my wife hadn't insisted. I evaluated a few other options for her that I could run off my own machine but none of them came close (only connected to a limited number of banks and needed much more manual effort). I am finally comfortable with it but it took a while even with my previous Intuit experience which had all been good.