Managing Your Spending with Mint

Controlling personal finance can be very complex these days. The number and types of debts, investments and other obligations have ballooned in the past 30 years. Keeping up with budgeting and spending is a constant source of stress for many people because of the volume of data that you need to evaluate on a monthly basis. For most people, it’s not feasible to keep track of finances with a ledger or even a folder full of Excel spreadsheets.

Personal finance software was designed to ease the burden of collecting financial data from the many accounts you have to keep track of. The first incarnations were slow and were mostly limited to computers running Microsoft Windows. Over time, most desktop computer based packages like Intuit’s ubiquitous Quicken became feature bloated and costlier.

In the past 15 years or so, with the rise of the power of the internet web browser, smaller, more agile companies are now able to pack many features into inexpensive (even free!) web applications. Mint.com is one of those packages. Founded in 2006, Mint quickly became very popular because of its strong feature set and a free option. Its strong suit is aggregating data from many different sources in order to allow a better overall view of a person’s true financial situation.

Mint features budgeting tools that can help with savings and other financial goals. Throughout the application, you can get tips and suggestions based on how you spend your income that can make you aware of habits that you didn’t even know you have.  Mint.com was recently acquired by Intuit, so time will tell how Mint.com evolves and what happens with Quicken over time.

Investment Tracking

Investments make up a large part of our financial anxiety. Tracking progress is easier to see with consolidated reporting. Mint says that it can integrate data from over 16,000 financial institutions so it is likely that Mint can integrate data from your bank or investment company.

Plain language categorization

With Mint it is possible to categorize entries from your different sources in plain language. So instead of getting almost unintelligible strings of parts of words that you usually see in your bank statements, you can customize the display to make reports easier to understand.

Using Mint with Your Financial Advisor

Hiring a financial advisor can give you an advantage over the DIY investor. As nice as the reporting, budgeting and data integration is with Mint, a skilled financial advisor can take your financial planning to the next level by analyzing all of that aggregated data. Having many data sources reduced to one comprehensive source can be a huge time saver for you and your advisor.

In addition, feedback and advice from your advisor can be used to customize the reporting in Mint so that you are able to keep track of progress for the plan that you and your advisor developed together.

Working with a skilled financial planner is smart. But using data aggregators like Mint to improve your data collection and accuracy is even better.