Make Money with Mint
Filed Under: Web Apps
Mint provides a web based personal finance management solution. Once you sign up with mint, free of charge, and enter all your financial account login details, such as bank and credit card accounts, Mint will provide daily updated information, with data pooled from all the accounts to give you a systematic overview of your spending. For example, Mint could tell you exactly how much you spent on gas or a summary of your total balance tabulated from all the accounts. In addition to this, Mint also provides you with intelligent suggestions, based on your spending patterns, such as suggestions for better deals on credit cards and banking accounts.
The most important advantage you have with Mint is a single interface to check the status on all your accounts, with detailed reports based on criteria which you decide. The promoters state that Mint typically points out savings of at least $1000 on the first login.
While the concept is not unique, and has been applied before in other sectors, which offer web based solutions for combined logins to multiple accounts, Mint is one of the first companies which attempts to do this for the financial sector. And that brings us to the question of security. How safe are you with providing all your financial information to a web based service? Mint’s secure login is certified by Verisign and Truste. That, however, is not entirely satisfactory. It just means that their data processing is secure. Ultimately, they still hold your data. So I looked into the profiles of the promoters. Their Board of Directors includes Josh Kopelman, Rob Hayes and Mark Goines. You can see their profiles here.
All said and done, it’s going to be a bit hard for Mint to be widely accepted and used, and the only way it will spread is if it receives positive recommendations by word of mouth. If the initial users find that it’s really as good and useful as they claim it is, then it could really take off.
Try it at www.mint.com
TheGrizz | Oct 2, 2007 | Reply
I like this product a lot, I plan to make great use of it. Admited the security question is a good one, but honestly in today’s world not even government data is safe. It is part of the risk of the freedom the online world gives us.
ayodleeuser | Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
I read this review and checked out Mint. It’s very cool except it only tracks my Credit Cards and my Checking acct. Repeat, only credit cards and checking. It can’t do any Brokerage accounts, any Retirement accts, etc.
Unfortunately that’s where most of my money is.
I checked around the web and found a site called Yodlee (amazingly enough Mint uses Yodlee for pretty much all it’s backend — Mint is simply a pretty user interface).
Yodlee is AMAZING!! It does CC’s, Checking, Savings, Retirement, Stocks, Brokerage, Loans, Mortgages, even my Delta Skymiles account!!
It’s also much more respected in the industry (not a startup) and has some pretty amazing security.
It pretty much has ALL the features of Mint (email alerts, auto transaction categorization, etc)
Oh another thing this whole “Intelligent Savings” recommendations is basically another word for SPAM — SPAM, people. The suggestions it made were totally meaningless even after several months of data. (Switch from this CC to this other one and save $1,000 — oh yeah? How does that make sense if I pay my bill off every month?)
Meanwhile, Yodlee has NO ads, NO spam, NO annoying graphics, just a very clean and minimal interface.
(Note, I don’t work for Yodlee or Mint or any other financial company — just a user that is frustrated with Quicken & MS Money)