Continuing on with our personal finance series (NFC, Transaction Alerts), in this post we’ll take a look at my current financial data aggregating service, Mint. A financial what now??? I’m just using fancy lingo for a website that brings all your financial accounts together for easy viewing and tracking.
Mint is available as a website and a smartphone app. I currently have it pulling in info from about seven different institutions…credit cards, bank accounts, mortgage, and investments as well as tracking values of assets such as my house and car. You start by signing in to each financial institution, and then transactions are automatically imported and categorized. If you don’t like how something is categorized, you can easily change it to fit your liking if you want to really drill down and get accurate reporting.
Speaking of reports, Mint has a section called Trends with all kinds of useful pre-built data such as Spending by Category, Income Over Time, Net Income Over Time, and many others. I most frequently use the Spending by Category to get a glimpse of my spending habits and for budgeting.
“Mint aims to be your one-stop resource for your entire personal financial picture.”
As for budgeting, there is a Budgets area where you can set limits by category and track how you’re doing. I prefer my trusty spreadsheet for budgeting, personally, but if you don’t already have a budget set up, Mint is super easy to set up for that purpose. It even includes bill reminders and can show you your credit score (TransUnion VantageScore). Mint aims to be your one-stop resource for your entire personal financial picture.
“a single source for keeping an eye on my financial transactions”
I like using Mint because it gives me a single source for keeping an eye on my financial transactions, monitoring balances, and reporting expenses. If I want to know how much I spent on groceries, it doesn’t matter whether I used my debit card, Visa card, or Discover card at the store (Hint: I used my Visa via Google Pay NFC), all of my grocery transactions will show up in a Mint report. What I end up doing is about once a week I log in to Mint and scroll through new transactions in case I missed anything in my instant alerts.
Mint is free, supported by ads. You can learn more on their website. Let me know if you’re using Mint or what other tools you use to stay on top of your finances.
Scott
We are trying to sort through our finances more thoroughly than the past since we’ll be (voluntarily) transitioning to single income for awhile. I logged into my Mint account for the first time in over 5 years and was reminded why I let the account go. Tried to add our PNC account and it said it was down for maintenance—try back in a few hours. Tried to delete old accounts that are still synced, and they won’t go away. Nothing ever seems to just work as smoothly as you are describing it.
Maybe it’s operator error.
So you’re not constantly updating, maintaining, and fixing glitches?
Greg Zimmerman
That’s a good point, Scott, and I apologize if I sensationalized Mint as being more magical than it is. I think the issues you’re describing are more with Mint having to try to keep up with non-standard authentication methods of various financial providers. I do periodically have to re-authorize logins to get things syncing. If you don’t find Mint to work well for you, you can take the same practices I described in the original post and apply them to your financial institutions directly. The important take-away is to be methodically reviewing your personal finances no matter what service or method you use. Thanks for reading and good luck!