Christian Financial Forums

[ntutak]

I current use Mint (actually I'm a recent convert from desktop Quicken). Now that Quicken Online is free, is anyone going to switch from Mint to Quicken Online? Is the price what drove you to Mint, or even at the same price (free), is Mint better?

[baolson]

Hi ntutak,

That is a good question - I just saw that Quicken is now free and would be curious if that is comparable to Mint and others like it. I currently use Yodlee but I think long term I might trust a name like Quicken over others, so I would be interested to see if we have positive response on their set up.

[mutex]

i like mint, Quicken is limited in the online version. You can do so much with mint.

[Bob]

As I mentioned in the post about quicken online, it was the first of the free ones to work easily with ING Direct. For whatever reason I could never get ING and Mint to play nice together. So, sadly, for that reason alone, I won't be using Mint anytime soon....

[matt]

hmm, I got mint to connect to ING with not much trouble.

I don't really use many of the features of mint other than it's nice to look at everything all at once...

[pochax]

Mint has just added a feature that tracks your investments against various benchmarks (like S&P 500 or Dow, NASDAQ, etc.). It can do it collectively or itemize each investment/fund. Not really necessary for everyday use but a nice feature (altho i think most brokerage websites do it as well but they wouldn't have necessarily ALL your investments on one page like Mint can do).
Again, Mint probably is best for the person who makes most of their purchases (like me) via Credit Card (and just pay off the balance every month) since it can automatically categorize the spend from the credit card info (ie. if you spent $7 on a value meal at McDonald's, Mint will automatically assign it as Fast Food on your budget). Problems arise when you buy multiple categories at the same place (eg. i bought a garden hose and fertilizer as well as milk/eggs/soda at Costco and categorized it all as "groceries") so i have to go in and manually change the categories....this can be tedious for some, but i don't mind it at all. But i can't imagine any website is so perfect that it will automate EVERYTHING for you perfectly. Bottom Line: if you write a lot of personal checks or use Cash, i don't think online tools like Mint are THAT useful if you don't want to put in the time to make sure the info is accurate....because garbage in, garbage out.

[Bob]

Pochax,
that is a good point - I am only interested in tools that will simplify my life. If it is going to take 3 hours each week manually entering transactions just so I can get a little data - it isn't worth it to me...

[geekgirl4god]

Personally I checked out both and found Buxfer to be better at the things that matter more everyday - Budgeting and Transactions. Check out my review:
http://joeandkristenolsen.com/journal/2 ... ol-buxfer/

[cleardensity]

Personally, I'll be starting up with Quicken Online - I am very familiar with the desktop version and trust InTuit so that's where I'll be.

[outofdebtagain]

I use Quicken on my desktop, and only use Mint to keep track of all my credit card accounts. I know everything is online now, but I don't like the idea of using Quicken Online with every single detail of everything online. My boss won't register to view her checking account online, because she doesn't want anyone to have access to her accounts online. I've tried to explain to her that it's already there, but it makes her feel safer to just not have that access. ;-/

[Amatachick]

I don't use any online budgeting sites because I just don't trust any one entity with that much of my information. I looked into Mint once and was horrified when it asked for my username/password for all my different financial sites. If/When Mint has a security breach you would be giving the attacker keys to all your financial data. I thoroughly read about the security structure setup at Mint, and it looks good, but I work in Information Security for a living and I know that no site is 100% secure. For most sites it's only just a matter of time till they're hacked. Just my own paranoid view.

[im4hunting]

I've tried Mint but continued having constant login issues with several of my accounts. I tried working through the problems with their help but found with Quicken Online, I don't have any issues at all. Though there was a couple things that Mint has that QO doesn't...but considering the fact that Mint couldn't access a couple of my accounts most every day...it was an easy decision.

After 2 months, I'm totally happy with Quicken Online.

[Bob]

I don't know - I finally got all of my accounts to work in Mint and I set them up in Quicken Online again and I just don't know that I am seeing enough of a benefit for me to use them. I mean we have our finances on a pretty tight leash so we don't really have many areas that we are spending more in than we know about - I calculate my Net WOrth every 6 months in my FLOP, so I guess mint or QO could make it a little bit easier... And Amatachick, you do bring up a good point - while I think Mint seems to have a pretty good defense in place, nothing is 100% safe, and if they got in, they have it all... Which of course would be even more incentive for them to want to hack in...

[CoolHappyGuy]

Hello ChristianPF community! I've missed you.

Mint

I am a recent convert to Mint.com. I absolutely love it! For one thing, this is a brainlessly simple (even a Christian Personal Finance Blogger can use it! ) way to create a FLOP (see http://www.christianpf.com/your-financial-life-on-one-page-flop/ that is up to date. Way Cool!

Setup for Mint was fairly easy. You add in your financial institutions using your id and password. I was able to set up virtually every single financial institution that I use for my finances (there are 1 or 2 that I'm looking into and/or waiting on them for info). The biggest challenge in this respect was ING Direct. (This is the flip said to ING's heavily-touted security http://www.christianpf.com/ing-banking-is-the-safest/). I am not exaggerating when I say that it took me at least 10 tries to set it up. (I finally did this past Saturday! I think I wore them down. ).

Plan to spend quite a bit of time setting up Mint as it "learns" from what you do. You can set up rules to make things easier (but I can't seem to set it up for split transactions). After a while (when it gets the "hang" of you and you have rules, etc. in place), it should be less manually intensive.

While Mint is a really great tool for keeping track of your financial picture and reporting where your money is going, there are some issues:

-For some transactions, you may have to wait a couple of days before it comes through Mint
-Mint is less good for forward planning (i.e. Where is your next paycheck going to go?)

Mint has a forum for your questions. Good tips & tutorials (this was how I figured out how to add ING).

Mint seems to be trying to tweak its features to make these more useful. Keep this in mind when you browse the forum for old issues. Mint may have introduced features that have solved the original problem.

You can use tags in addition to Mint's categories. This can be useful for independent tracking or earmarking savings/spending amounts (I wish there was a more straightforward way of doing this.).

Mint is a great tool. I don't see it totally replacing my desktop Quicken -- but it's a start! (Shhh! I also use Mint to track my finances at work -- not an option with Quicken.)


Quicken Online

Quicken Online (QO) claims to give you the info you need so that you can track spending on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis. This is a feature that I wish that Mint had so I signed up with them.

It was not as easy to sign up with my financial institutions with QO. Most of them were ok, but a couple did not go through. (Again ING was difficult -- no suprise there).

QO does not allow you to split transactions! This was a real deal-killer. I HAVE to split our WalMart purchases as these typically span a few categories.

I was also disappointed in the paycheck planning feature. I did not find it very useful at all.

QO did not seem to offer anything that Mint wasn't doing better so I deleted my QO account. Perhaps some Quicken users out there have some different perspectives.

[Bob]

Coolhappy,
thanks for sharing your experience with those two... I love it!!

[bjacobm]

I like Mint! Easy to use, but I wonder about the "security" of my personal information.

[darcymac]

I've never heard of Mint... going to check it out myself.

Thanks for the info.

[tidi]

i never tried either but i will now thanks

[CoolHappyGuy]

(Hmmm, is this forum more or less relevant with Quicken's acquisition of Mint? Pardon my bunnytrail.)

I am in the process of trying to ween myself from desktop Quicken and, as of January 1, 2010, begin to use Mint exlusively to track my finances. This is a BIG step for me as our household has used Quicken for about 13 years. My recent computer blackout (lasting more than a month!) in which we did not have access to our computer data (due to real stupidity on my part in which I accidentally deleted a bunch of Windows XP files). This put a real crimp in our financial management. The blackout really emphasized to me the vulnerability of utilizing a desktop product to manage our finances. It took me several days to enter transactions into Quicken so that it was caught up.

In the meantime, I am taking a parallel approach to this conversion. I am using desktop Quicken AND I am using Mint. I do this because 1) I have adequate financial management with Quicken until I am ready to have Mint take over. 2) I can correct Mint categorization of transactions by referring to the Quicken equivalent and also assign categories to transactions that Mint considered "uncategorized."

Even after the transition to Mint, I will still keep the Quicken history. I'm not throwing away 13 years of life! Afterwards I plan to convert my Quicken transactions to GnuCash for that day when I upgrade our computer. GnuCash should be available regardless of the operating system in place.

I'm transitioning not only to take advantage of Mint's automation (and free myself from time-consuming data-entry into Quicken) but also for risk management purposes as well.

[pochax]

fyi, Quicken Online users: you are getting migrated to Mint in the next 6 to 9 months:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/03/mints-aaron-patzer-we-will-end-of-life-quicken-online-in-six-to-nine-months/

Yesterday, Intuit closed on its previously announced $170 million acquisition of personal budgeting site Mint, making Mint founder and CEO Aaron Patzer the new vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group. He is now in charge of not only Mint.com, but also all of Quicken’s online and desktop products. What will his first order of business be? I spoke to him today to find out.

“Over the next 6 to 9 months,” he says, “we will end-of-life Quicken Online and their customer’s data will be migrated over to Mint.” Just a few months ago, the Quicken Online team was questioning Mint’s success. Now, Patzer is their new boss.