mint.com?

sarack

anyone use it?

sarack

i just signed up and put all of our accounts in and now can see how much debt we have. wow. i didn't realize. well maybe i did but it was a shock to lay it out there. this website tells you how much you are worth... and that was hard to see.

anyway, i'm determined to pay off our credit cards before the goal that i set up. i think i can do it.

 

amandasw

My sister first told me about it a couple years ago (she heard about it in a business school class I think) and then I finally signed up maybe a year or more ago.  I definitely think it's cool and mainly just used it to track where we spent our money, mostly out of curiosity.  Sadly, I haven't really kept up with it (I think I would try to review all the purchases now and then and correct any 'mistakes' it made in assigning categories) although I really like it.  I think right now it's sort of pointless for us because we don't work off a budget with what I make exactly - when we have two incomes and need to start organizing savings vs. spending vs. loan payments etc. I will definitely use it more.

uwhuskygirl

I used it for a while, but then it just got to be a PITA because of the time lag for charges to hit my account and hit mint. I would have to go back and redate and recategorize charges to have it line up correctly with the monthly budget. It works well if you have the time to devote to it.

emyinpink

We use it and like it. The more you use it, the more it learns your categories.

dreamwinds

emyinpink:

We use it and like it. The more you use it, the more it learns your categories.

We use it too, and this is true.

I had to forbid D from bringing mint in to bed cause he is obsessed with it.

jennlin

to somebody who's never used it, but has heard bits and pieces of it, please explain. thx.

uwhuskygirl

How did you guys get it to learn your categories? I used it for over a year and it didn't learn anything. I had to manually go in to change categories and dates almost every day.

emyinpink

There's a setting when you change the category to have it remember. So like every time I go to the same coffee shop, it's always categorized as in our food/dining category.

amandasw

uwhuskygirl:

How did you guys get it to learn your categories? I used it for over a year and it didn't learn anything. I had to manually go in to change categories and dates almost every day.

that's really weird, I don't think I ever had a problem with dates or anything.  I think when you change a category for a purchase you can say "always put in X category" or something like that (it's been a while since I used it)

amandasw

jennlin:

to somebody who's never used it, but has heard bits and pieces of it, please explain. thx.

Basically, you can safely connect it to your bank/credit union account and it tracks credit/debit card purchases as well as any transfers/deposits/etc.  It automatically assigns them categories - there are big categories like "food" and then within that I think there's "eating out" vs. "groceries" for example (sometimes it makes mistakes though so you have to check and makes sure - I would go to the Continental restaurant and it often assigned it "travel" thinking it was the airline, lol).  So then it makes graphs and charts so you can track your spending.  I haven't used any other function, but it helps you set goals for saving, paying off loans etc.  For me it was just interesting to see what portion of our money was going towards different things. 

dreamwinds

amandasw:

jennlin:

to somebody who's never used it, but has heard bits and pieces of it, please explain. thx.

Basically, you can safely connect it to your bank/credit union account and it tracks credit/debit card purchases as well as any transfers/deposits/etc.  It automatically assigns them categories - there are big categories like "food" and then within that I think there's "eating out" vs. "groceries" for example (sometimes it makes mistakes though so you have to check and makes sure - I would go to the Continental restaurant and it often assigned it "travel" thinking it was the airline, lol).  So then it makes graphs and charts so you can track your spending.  I haven't used any other function, but it helps you set goals for saving, paying off loans etc.  For me it was just interesting to see what portion of our money was going towards different things. 

This plus..

We use it to keep track of our budget. We've assigned certain amounts of money to certain things and decide whether to roll it over or not (to the next month, like our utility bills aren't charged every month). It gave suggestions, based on how we've spent in the past, on what's the best numbers to target for certain things (like monthly gas or utilities or groceries).

It'll also give you tips on where you can save more money, so that's kind of interesting. I don't know if we've ever used that function yet.