Tech Lister

I included Mint in my Get Organized class earlier this month and after giving it another look decided to jump in with both feet and become a user.  I think our financial lives have become much more complicated as online services and apps have taken over.  It is simpler than ever to get access to your financial information but making sense of it is much harder.  Mint allows you to securely access all of your accounts and financial information in one place and provides many free ways to track and monitor your spending.  Add:

• Checking accounts
• Savings accounts
• Investments
• Loans
• Credit cards
• Bills

Getting started is–as advertised–easy and fast but getting everything into Mint is harder than I expected.  I would have said I did everything online but actually there were some things that I didn’t yet have online access to–stuff like retirement accounts that I don’t think too much about.  While it was a bit time consuming, I needed to do that stuff anyway, so the first step for me was making sure I had online access to all relevant financial accounts.  One of those vendors sent me the access code in the MAIL.  You know, that stuff that comes from the post office, so it was a good week before I had access to everything.

Once those things were all in place, I could login to Mint and add each account.  I think it might be easier for new users to get all the info then set up the account so that the setup wizard can be used more fully.

New users go through a series of items to set up alerts, goals and the like.  Since I set up my account and then went back a couple of weeks later to create a budget, Mint had begun to guess how much I wanted to budget for certain items.  That created a bit of clean-up but it was still less than an hour to go through every budget category and add income and expenses and set goals.  Over the course of the next month I’ll make sure spending ends up in the right category–which I can do from my phone or tablet so it should be pretty easy–and how well I met my goals.

that’s as far as I have gotten.  So far I have about 3 hours invested but think I will like what I am able to get back.  Here are my overall thoughts so far:

• It is pretty easy to use but there are some places where I thought I was saving the data but I wasn’t.  Setting up the budget was pretty repetitive for this reason.
• I wanted to share all the information with my husband but to do so had to share the account information, there aren’t shared accounts.  This isn’t a big deal but it was kind of surprising since many people have others on their accounts.
• It connects to everything I’ve looked for so far, retirement accounts, college funds, lenders, everyone seems to be in there, which made adding things easy.
• It will be great to see all accounts in one place under one password.

I’ll do another post when I’m further in but for now it looks very promising!