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
3 users commented in " Mint.com gets a thumbs down. "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI like that mint tracks my finances without me logging in. I consider that a feature. How else would they be able to notify when important events happen? Either way good write up though I disagree.
I can definitely see it from both sides, being a feature, and not. However, I’m pretty wary of startups who want to have access to my most sensitive information. I believe if it were a desktop application, I would feel much more comfortable with it.
Hi David,
Mint.com is strictly read only, so there is no way anyone, even you, could move any money around with it. Like any other system, including online banking, the security is only as good as your password. There is no way to recover your bank passwords through Mint either, they are one-way encrypted.
Data syncs every night, so that you don’t need to ever worry about data entry or manual sync-ing. This is the primary benefit of Mint, it is designed for the type of person who just wants to have a handle on their finances without doing bookkeeping every month.
I also argue that this keeps you safer, as we proactively alert you if we notice any activity in your account such as large purchases that might be an indicator of fraud or a stolen card. Several users have written in that we have saved them in this manner.
Thanks for giving it a try, and I encourage you to keep an eye on it as we are continually making this product better.
Thanks,
Jason M. Putorti
Lead Designer, mint.com
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