Dumb Medicine

If you’re like me, then you’re sitting in your kitchen before work and you’re writing a blog post. I know that was a poor shot at humor, but it’s early and I pretty much had to do it. Anyways, in the last 12 months or so I have fallen in love with mint.com. And they don’t even know I love it.

If you haven’t heard of mint.com, it’s a website that logs into each of your bank accounts, retirement accounts, loans, and many more accounts and keeps track of them all in one place. I know people are hesitant about allowing access to a third party for their financial information, but hear me out.

I used to have 3 bank accounts, 2 credit cards, and 6 separate student loans. I also had 7 or 8 passwords that I had to use to check each one of the accounts. It was a bit redundant. Especially if I just wanted to check the balance for my accounts.

So a friend suggested for me to try mint.com, and I’ve never looked back.

Features

So my favorite thing about mint.com is the features. Because it downloads each transaction from each of your accounts, mint.com can show you the grand scheme of what’s going on in your financial world. It offers Trending which allows you to classify your expenses. An example would be if I went to Home Depot and spent a buttload on rakes, then I could classify that as Lawn & Garden. Then when you look at the Trending for the month, you’ll notice you spent a buttload on Lawn & Garden for that month.

Since Lawn & Garden is not a regular spending category for most people (except farmers), it doesn’t represent a category you should budget for. However, if you did want to budget for rakes, mint.com can help you do that. Their Planning tab gives you the option to create a monthly budget. This was helpful for me because my wife and I have separate credit cards, and we were having trouble keep up with how much we’d spent on each. What we did was set mint.com up to email me when we had exceeded the budget for a certain category for the month. Freaking awesome.

Another tab available on mint.com is the Ways to Save. This one is a bit self explanatory. If you enter your most recent credit score, the website will look for credit cards, bank accounts, and investing you can do to help you save money. It convinced me to get a Discover Card, and will probably show you some way you could be saving.

Mint.com is fully customisable, so your experience with it may be completely different than mine. I personally love this service, and will continue to use it.

Design

I would be doing you a disfavor if I didn’t talk about the design of mint.com. It’s got a very clean design. They have a soft green background with a white gradient which makes it look slick. I’m not sure, but I believe there is a ton of AJAX on the pages, so you don’t always click the submit button. If you’re unfamiliar with AJAX, it’s a way of building websites so you don’t have to click submit buttons all the time.

I remember when I first started using it, it didn’t take me very long to figure out where everything is. The organization of the website is intuitive, and the layout is easy to read. You’ll find your way around quickly, and if you don’t, send me a comment and I’ll try to write a tutorial.

Wish List

The only thing mint.com doesn’t do that I wish it would do is allow me to pay off credit card bills and transfer money between accounts. You can think of the website as a view into your financials, but nothing more. You can not move money around, pay off bills, or otherwise alter your online bank accounts. I understand how that can protect customers, but it would still be great to be able to do everything on one site.

Well, I hope you found this article helpful. It’s the first review I’ve ever written so there are bound to be some gigantic holes. Let me know what you think and please comment if you’ve found this helpful or if this has been a waste of your time.

-DM