App Review: Mint

App Review: Mint

Description

• Mint is a free online software service for tracking all of your personal finance information in one place.  You can monitor all of your account balances, track your spending, categorize your expenses, develop and track budgets, see your monthly cash flow, get bill pay reminders, and monitor your credit score all through using Mint.
• Mint has smartphone, tablet, and desktop platforms for their financial software.  They all sync information together automatically.  I have used all three, but I mainly work with the mobile app on my smartphone.  For any financial software, I think the mobile app is the most important since so much of our lives are managed from our smartphones these days.  You want to be able to check things on the go or enter manual expenses when you are actually spending the money, not have to wait until you get home to use your computer. 
• How can they do this for free? That is very a good question and one I always ask.  The way Mint is able to offer this software for free is through advertising offers for credit cards (American Express, Chase, Capital One, Discover, etc.), investment accounts (TD Ameritrade, Ally, Blooom, Fundrise, etc.), and loan consolidation (SoFi, Marcus, Lending Club, etc.).  These adds are relatively non-intrusive and don’t distract significantly from the platform.  There aren’t any popups on the app or screens you have to work through before getting to your personal finance data. 
• Is it secure?  This is also an important question.  I would refer you to the Safety and Security portion of their website for details regarding this.  I’ve used Mint for several years now and I’ve been very happy with their security.  They have a nice combination of convenience with Touch ID access, and strength with multi-factor authentication when logging on with a new device.  
• All of the screenshots were taken directly from Mint’s description on the Apple App Store or from mint.com.

What I Like

• Excellent User Interface Personal finance is already a confusing and daunting subject for many. Mint does a very good job of keeping it simple with very intuitive summaries, graphs, and charts. When you open the app there is a very nice overview of your finances. It gives you an overall account balance, which is essentially your net worth. It also gives your cash balance (checking and savings accounts), how much you owe in credit debt (this value is mainly credit card debt and does not include your home mortgage, student loans, or auto loans), and the value of your investment portfolio (both retirement and non-retirement accounts). Your most recent credit score is also displayed at the top of the screen. This nice overview keeps some of the most important numbers at the forefront, especially your net worth.

• Automatically Updates All of your Accounts  Mint does an excellent job of syncing with nearly every type of finance account out there.  This is a really easy process to set up.  You simply find your bank or other financial institution from their extensive database, enter your login information, and sync your account for the first time.  Mint will store this information so every time you open the app in the future it will log into all of your accounts in the background, automatically update your balances, and recalculate your net worth.  

• Great for Tracking Expenses Mint does an excellent job of tracking your expenses and the categories they belong in. The software does a pretty good job of assigning an expense category based on on where a transaction occurred. For example, it will usually recognize that a $50 transaction at a Chevron was for Gas & Fuel and categorize it accordingly. What I like to do is review all of my spending every day or two and make sure each transaction is listed under the appropriate expense category. Usually Mint has already made the right assignment, but if not, I simply change it to the category I want. The software seems to be able to “learn” your preferences, at least based on my experience. I’ve noticed that if I change the category of the transaction at a given store, the next time I spend something at that store it will usually be listed under what I changed it to, which is very convenient. The default categories are pretty darn good, but if you want to further customize them or make your own subcategories, you can do this but you will have to go to the desktop platform to do so. But once these changes are made, they will sync across all of your devices and work really well.

• Great for Budgeting  Budgeting is another area where Mint really shines.  In Mint you are able to review how much you spent in a given category over the last several months, and then you can set a budget for that category.  For example, it may be difficult to estimate how much you spent on eating out in a given month because certain events may cluster.  One month you may have eaten out for a couple of birthday parties for your kids, you went out with your friends a few times, and there was a graduation party at a restaurant.  Then, the next month you may not have any of these events.  Using your expenses from either of these months alone would make setting an accurate budget for eating out difficult to estimate, but when you take the data from the last 6 months combined, you are much more likely to set an accurate budget.  

• Set Reminders for Bills  If you have had a difficult time in the past with paying your bills on time, this could be a lifesaver for you.  You can set reminders for any of your bills and then get email reminders for them.  It will also give you a notification inside the app.  The great part about this is that you can look directly at your accounts in the app and make sure you have enough to cover the bill and avoid any problems with overdrafts.  Oftentimes failure to pay bills on time and overdrafts in your checking account go together.  Those penalty fees will significantly slow your progress towards FI and are something that can easily be avoided.   

• Tracks Your Credit Score  Your credit score is another key indicator of your financial health.  It is important because if you ever need to borrow money for something, the interest rate you get will most likely be based on your credit score.  Now, I generally don’t recommend taking out loans to purchase items (more to come on this later), but most of us cannot purchase a home with out taking out a home mortgage.  When you are trying to get a home mortgage, the bank will use your credit score to calculate your interest rate, and every tenth of a percent here can cost you thousands of dollars over the next 15-30 years.  So, it is very important to have the best credit score that you can.  Every three months Mint will give you an updated credit score and break down the components of that score:  your on-time payments, your credit usage (percent of your total credit you have spent), your average age of credit accounts, your total number of credit accounts, your credit inquiries (when a lender checks your credit score before offering you a loan), and your derogatory remarks.  This helps you see areas you can work to improve your credit.

What I Wish Was Better

• Tablet App Needs Some Work  While the mobile app for smartphones is quite good, I have been less than impressed with the tablet app, specifically the iPad app.  You would think with a larger device and screen that more options would be available than the smartphone mobile app, but the opposite is actually true.  When working on my iPad I feel very limited using the Mint app.  If I want to do anything meaningful on Mint when using my iPad I end up logging into Mint through an internet browser and essentially using the desktop version, which also isn’t awesome when using a tablet.  So, if you primarily use a tablet, then there may be some frustration with trying to use Mint. 

• Very Limited Investment Portfolio Analysis  For me, this is where Mint falls significantly short of the mark.  There is no significant breakdown of your investment portfolio compared to other apps.  On the mobile app it just lists your investment account balances with no further tools or options.  On the desktop version you can look at graphs to see how your account balances have performed over time, and compare them to a basic index like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but not much more than that.  There is no analysis of asset allocation, sector allocation, investment fee analyzer, or overall risk management evaluation.  For those that are a little farther along in their journey towards FI, Mint does not have the tools to help with optimizing your investments.  

• Some Features Limited to Desktop Version  There are some key features of Mint that are only available on the desktop version of the software.  One example is setting financial goals.  Mint allows you to set financial goals and then track your progress towards them.  I did this for a couple of goals, one of which was saving money for an emergency fund.  I thought this was a neat feature initially, but if I wanted to check my progress towards this goal I realized I couldn’t find it on the smartphone or tablet app, I had to go to the desktop version of the software to find it, which I rarely used.  Another example of this is creating new categories for expenses.  As you are going through your daily transactions, you may come across a transaction for which you would like to make a new category.  You can certainly do this, but not from your phone or tablet.  You have to log onto the desktop version and do it from there, which is obviously less convenient.  It would be nice if you could access some of these simple key features in the mobile app, especially since everyone primarily uses mobile devices now.  

Who Would I Recommend it For?

Overall, I think Mint is some of the best comprehensive personal finance software available and has tools that anyone tracking their finances can benefit from. Plus, it’s free. I think those just starting out in personal finance would benefit the most from Mint.  Mint is ideal if you are focused on tracking your expenses and figuring out where your money is going, developing budgets and seeing if you are sticking to the budgets on a regular basis, or if you are working on debt repayment.  If you are no longer in debt and more focused on investing, then Mint may leave you a little disappointed and I would recommend Personal Capital (see my review here).