Move over Quicken, Mint.com has arrived. I just spent some time playing around with Mint.com after my wife Katherine set up the account. All I have to say is wow. As a family, we have endeavored from time to time to be regular users of Quicken. We would always eventually stop using it because Quicken was too hard to set up, only ran on one of machines since it was client software (making it hard for us both to check in on our finances), it seemed to regularly have trouble ingesting our online account data from our bank accounts and credit cards and it also would regularly lose categorizations of expenses. I’m only about 20 minutes in to using Mint.com, but it seems to have nailed all the issues we had with Quicken, making it much more likely we’ll actually use this on a regular basis. Account setup was a breeze, it is easily accessible through a browser, the expense categorization functionality seems really robust and the interactive charts and graphs to analyze spending against your budget and relative to other users is really cool for a stats/analytics junkie like me. And it is free, though I would happily pay for the service. Bravo, Mint!
May 2, 2008