I don’t know where I’ve been, but apparently this cool financial tool has been around for awhile. But  it was only recently when attending a financial class that I found out about Min.com. For years I used Mvelopes and the jury is still out on which one I’ll continue to use…. but both definitely have their advantages. I’ll stick with the advantages of Mint.com for now.

First & Foremost….IT’S FREE!!  (Can’t beat that!) But here’s where it really gets good.  Mint downloads, categorizes and graphs all of your finances automatically everyday! That’s a great advantage. Mvelopes downloads daily, but I have to categorize each item each time I enter the portal. That’s HUGE in time saving! I can also see the PIE picture of my finances at a glance without any work. There are of course mistakes that this program makes.

For instance, I wired my “mentee” in Africa some money two different times. Because my bank posted it with the phrase “limited” to the payee, Mint.com categorized that as Clothing to The Limited. Trust me…for several minutes I was FREAKING OUT, thinking that someone in my family had spent over $1000 on clothes at The Limited. But luckily, Mint.com also referenced it with the name Christine, which got me back on track. It’s not too difficult to reassign the categories if they are downloaded as Uncategorized” due to lack of knowledge they have about the payee or if they are mistaken. All of my utilities and groceries were categorized correctly and it took only a few minutes to categorize the rest.

Mint has an easy budgeting feature. It even emails you if you’re over budget!!! (Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve gotten a few emails.) The bad news about the budget is that it isn’t very customizable. There are plenty of categories, but you can’t name them exactly what you want…..bummer, but liveable.

All accounts in one place! Got to love that…including credit cards, 401k, & stocks (just DON”T look at your stocks right now….it won’t be pretty!) You can get a complete picture of your finances right here on Mint!

Mint has a feature called “Pay off your debts”. Because I don’t have any debt,I wasn’t able to see what this tool can do. Someone will have to enlighten me on what it can do for you as far as tracking debt pay-downs.

There is also a tab called “Ways to Save”. I thought it was really cool that it told me that if I would have put the cash from my non-interest checking account into E-Trade Investment checking account, I would have made an additional $1,442 in interest this year! That opened me eyes.

Anyway…..It’s definitely worth investing 20-30 minutes into signing up, adding all accounts and setting up a budget. You will know where you are financially, and might be able to make better choices.

Mint.com
Mint Blog

Has anyone out there used Mint.com?  Tell us your experience and how to get the most out of it. Once I get a handle on this…there will definitely be a few sentences in my LifeVision about this amazing tool for keeping track of my finances!