So after Jason from Mint posted a comment on my Mint.com review, I decided to give Mint.com another shot.  After several months of usage, I can definitely say that I’m  impressed with its features.   However, I’m still a little uneasy about all of my information being stored on their vendor’s servers (even after watching the CEO’s video about Mint.com security).

Why?  Well, I understand that their using a number to only identify me after the data is stored, but at the time of me transmitting my information to you, there’s a chance that your servers/code are compromised and thus the information is compromised.   What if they have a rogue employee who’s decided to capture the user’s information?  I don’t see any PCI-type compliance that the organization follows.

With all that said and I still used the application for several months.  I really do like the fact that I can see snapshots of my financial health on a weekly basis.  I also really enjoy that they try to find me deals for credit cards and savings/checking accounts.  What I would really love is if they took it a step further and helped me do some financial planning.  They’re probably still a bit far out on that, but I think that would be the most useful information for me.  I really haven’t had a hard time budgeting the last couple of years, but would definitely rather see more/new ways of me to accumulate better interest, better investment strategies, etc.

Overall I can definitely see the usefulness for an application like this and do recommend this for people who are trying to figure out how to save money or for people who are trying to get their finances straightened out.  In regards to the security vs. help argument, I figure if you need some help to get your finances straight, you should probably take the risk.  It’s probably safer to use Mint.com’s budgeting feature than using some sketchy “debt consultant”.

I haven’t tried their competitors out yet, but they do exist:  Wesabe, Quicken Online, PageOnce, Geezeo, Buxfer, and Thrive.  (Note:  I really hated Quicken for the Mac.  It’s the reason I tried Mint.com in the first place).

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