I just started using Quicken for myself and Quickbooks for my consulting business. I really like the ease of use and time saving that these tools offer me. However, I always thought that the reporting functionality of each application was quite lacking. I heard some nice things about Mint.com and decided to check it out.
Mint.com is an online money mangement tool, that allows you to analyze how and where you’re spending your money, with nice looking graphs and reports. I loved the idea but was a little wary of putting my financial login information into the system. I decided to test it with one of my credit cards that I use pretty frequently despite the concern. I was hoping that they had some sort of mind blowing technology that would make me thousands of dollars richer!
No luck. The setup was fairly simple and its a very nice design and it was very simple to enter in my login information for my credit card. Once I logged in, it started downloading all my transactions from the last month. It even told me that there were a better APR offer on another account. I started setting up a budget and analyzing my data. After finishing everything, I still wasn’t very impressed with the functionality. While the design and display of everything was nice, I still felt cautious about placing my bank account information onto the system. In the end Mint.com didn’t offer me the value for me to override my security fears. The reports, while very pretty, still is about the same as Quicken.
To make matters worse, when I logged off, the following day I received an email that Mint.com updated my account information WHILE I WAS NOT LOGGED ON. What, are you kidding me??? You went into my account and grabbed new transactions without telling me that you were gonna do that? Uhh. A little too scary/creepy for me. I decided in the end that they had waaay to much access to my information. If a hacker was able to get in, the could empty my account and charge a new tv on my cards!!! I decided to terminate my account. Hopefully Mint.com does in fact totally delete all my information.
In the end, I just couldn’t trust a relatively unknown startup to secure my data. The fact that they had updated my account information while I wasn’t there just made it feel 10x insecure to me. They totally lost all credibility with me when that happened.
Mint.com : Thumbs down
