Think of this post more as a Public Service Announcement than anything else. There are no affiliate links. This is just something I use that is unbelievably useful, and I think you should use it too. This is about a tool I discovered that radically changed how I thought about and tracked money. It’s called Mint (www.mint.com). It’s a free service provided by Intuit, the company behind TurboTax and Quickbooks.
Mint brings together all your financial accounts under one roof to help monitor your finances. If you still do everything in this day and age using paper statements and handwritten checks, I strongly suggest modernizing your life to make it easier on yourself. I would probably phrase it in a more condescending way, but that’s what I would mean to say. In my adult life, I have always used online banking, bill pay, etc. for 99.9% of my financial needs.
Automating Tediousness: Mint To The Rescue!
When I first started my career, I would go through each bank’s site and login to monitor my financial activity. Did my paycheck come in? Check the bank’s site to make sure. How much did I end up spending in total last month on food? Check American Express. While it far outdid waiting for paper statements and hand-tallying up the totals, there had to be a better way to see this stuff in real time.
Here’s where Mint comes in. You start an account and input your online banking, credit cards, investment accounts, home, cars, etc., all in one place. Their security is cutting-edge, and uses VeriSign and multi-factor authentication. This ensures you’re the only one ever accessing your account, so rest easy. When you login to Mint, it automatically refreshes the data from all of your disparate accounts into one convenient interface. It’s seriously that easy.
The Best Parts For Me
Everything In One Slick User Interface
There are three things that Mint did for me that was super helpful. Far and away the most important was putting all of my transactions in one place. The transactions tab shows the date, amount, vendor, and classifies the expense (mortgage, home improvement, business expenses, daycare, whatever!) in every single account I have. I cannot underscore how informative this has been for me in developing household budgets and figuring out spending habits.
I Can Self-Monitor My Accounts
It’s also been great from an account security perspective. Since there’s only one place to look to see all of this data, I’m more likely to catch fraudulent purchases sooner and head off an even bigger headache down the line. Can you imagine getting your credit card bill mailed to you six weeks after someone has gotten a hold of your credit card information and run up a huge bill? It’s the difference between a paper cut and bleeding out!*
Net Worth Tracking
The third financial benefit afforded to me by Mint has been to track my overall net worth. Do you know your net worth right now? Could you tell me within 30 seconds? I do, and I can. This is important to me because it keeps the big picture in focus. Why else take an interest in personal finance other than to take control of your future and make your financial life less stressful?
Every time I sign into Mint I can see if I’m sailing in the right direction. Obviously this net worth number fluctuates (i.e., it decreases sometimes). However, it’s a huge help to put things in perspective and encourage me to continue to make good decisions for my family’s future.
Other Details
So how does the company make money, and what else does Mint do? Well, as I understand it, Intuit makes its money off this service by offering you tailor-made deals (which are non-intrusive on their interface and you can totally ignore) based on your financial transactions.
For example, when I just logged in, I got a banner that said “You spent $938 on groceries last month. Did you maximize your rewards?” It then linked to a grocery rewards credit card. This could end up being helpful for people, and I assume they get a cut when people sign up for credit cards because of their links. That’s it.
And What Else Does Mint Do?
- You can set goals, whereby it monitors your account transactions to inform you of your progress towards the goal. Want to have $10 million in your investment accounts by 2030? “You made XX progress toward your $10 million dollar goal!” it says.
- There’s a credit score-monitoring portion of their service that gives you a free credit score each month and tells you why it is what it is. That’s cool.
- You can set budgets, which it then automatically fills in based on your spending at various vendors. Pretty slick.
- There is a “Trends” section. This gives you some neat little infographics that inform you of your spending, income, net income, assets, debts, and net worth over time. I can tell you definitively that I have spent $385,082.61 on “Home” (in 805 transactions) since I started tracking my finances in Mint. If I wanted the details on this, I could click the infographic and see every one of them. That’s 805 transactions on mortgage payments, home improvement, refinances, down payments, etc., since 2013. Pretty wild.
Mint’s budget section. You can add categories, change amounts, etc., all to customize your budget to fit your needs. Mint then updates it when you make new transactions automatically. 
So THAT’S where all my money goes…
That’s about it for my take on Mint. I would highly suggest everyone register immediately. If you hate it, you can always unregister your account and go on with your life.
*Of course, any good credit card affords you 0% fraud liability, but shouldn’t we all be trying to reduce this kind of shit-baggery?
