Canadian Finance Blog

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 02:00 AM PDT

About 8 months ago I wrote a review of Mint. They had just launched the Canadian version of the site, and I eagerly joined as I had heard so many positive reviews from our southern friends. I had a couple of gripes about the site, but I loved many more things, and therefore recommended it as a product worth using. I did, however, note that I hadn’t been using it for very long, and as such, wouldn’t be able to give a full and complete Mint review. Well, I’ve been using Mint for 8 months now, and here are my current thoughts.

Pros

I don’t like to spend a lot of time on my finances. I’m much more of a “set it and forget it” kind of guy when it comes to budgeting, so I have all my bills and savings automated so that I never have to worry about not having enough for the phone bill or not being strong enough to set money aside for the future. Therefore, I absolutely LOVE Mint’s ability to let me hop onto the website, and within seconds the website has accessed my bank accounts and credit cards, gotten updated information from their websites, and compiled it all neatly in front of me. I often will just log into Mint, ensure that nothing looks terribly out of place, and will rest assured that I don’t have any fires to put out.

At the same time, Mint is also great at getting down to the nitty and gritty. Once every two weeks or so, I will go through all the transactions that I’ve made, again, just confirming that transactions went through okay, I wasn’t double charged for anything, and everything is labeled correctly. Every single transaction in or out is listen for me, chronologically, and I can quickly find a bill and sort the transactions by that type to ensure that my latest cable bill, for example, matches with what I have been getting charged in the past.

Best of all, Mint’s powerful budgeting and trends calculations get better with time. At first, I could only look back a month or two, but now that I have been using it for 8 months, I have almost a year’s worth of data to look back upon. I can see exactly how much I am spending on my car, for example, and if I spent more in the summer or in the winter. I can see in which months we spent a lot on groceries, and in which we were eating through our freezer. I can tell in which months we were tired and stressed the most, as those are the months we ate out the most. Seeing all of this incredibly personalized data about myself helps me learn about my own personal spending habits, and helps me address them for the future. Mint teaches me how I have been using my money, and by doing so, teaches me how to use my money better

Cons

Sadly, the cons that I listed on the first Mint review still stand. I still can’t add my Student Loans (seriously Mint?), Mint still mislabels transactions, and Mint still has me adding assets manually, so depreciating assets like vehicles are going to constantly mess up my financial totals that Mint provides to me. I would have to go in and manually change them as the valuation on my vehicle or home changes. I avoid that particular problem by just not adding any additional assets.

Even more sadly, a few more negatives have popped up in the last few months. The first, and foremost, was a weird issue with the system. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what happened, but somehow I started seeing duplicate transactions in my account. I thought, at first, that I had been charged twice at a particular restaurant, but when I noticed that I had multiple charges at a couple of locations I got suspicious. I checked with my credit card’s website, and that did not report the same double charges. Back on Mint, I finally figured out that my credit card had been added twice to my account. At first, I just went through and labelled the duplicates as duplicates, and Mint removed them. That, however, was time consuming. I then tried to figure out how to remove one of the credit cards from the site, but was unable to. When I contacted Mint’s support, I finally figured out that this was an issue that they are aware of, and the “fix” was to go into the settings on one of the credit cards and to mark it as “hidden”. It seems quite odd to me that there is no easier way of removing an account from my Mint’s portfolio, and to this day it is still sitting there, hidden away. Mint is still usable, but I do not know if a bunch of the data that I had marked as duplicate is now completely gone, as I do not know if the transactions that I marked were from the duplicate or the original.

The only other issue that I have is that Mint will randomly stop being able to pull the information from one of my accounts. Currently, my credit card account has not been updated on the site for about a week. Mint keeps asking me to confirm that my account still exists on the credit card’s site (it does), and to confirm my login information (it is correct), yet will constantly time out and be unable to pull the credit card’s data. It has done this before with my online account and my other bank account. Often this problem fixes itself within a few days, but is nonetheless annoying to deal with.

Conclusion

Overall, Mint is a fantastic resource and I highly recommend people check their site out. I, personally, have not had any type of privacy or security concerns, and the benefits that I get from having all my personal financial information in one location, stored historically, is far greater than any fear I have. If you were unimpressed with Mint’s tools, check them out again once they have a few more months of data, you may be surprised at what it can do.

Have you been using Mint? What do you think?

Mint Review, 8 Months Later originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on August 3, 2011.