Trying Out Mint.com

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I’ve used Quicken for as much as 20 years now. I forget exactly when I started using it, I know I was using it at college in the early 1990s (but I might have started as early as 1989). Over the last couple of years, it’s gotten to be more tedious than it has in the past to keep my Quicken accounts up to date.

Perhaps I should explain how I use Quicken. I use it to track all of my cash, checking and credit card accounts. For the majority of my use of Quicken, I’ve entered all of the data by hand–that’s been my check as part of verifying charges. In the last two years or so I started downloading transactions directly from my banks (which works great, if all of the accounts downloaded consistently…since early 2009 I haven’t been able to get my primary credit card to download automagically properly :( ). Also, since about March 2009, I haven’t done any updating in Quicken–I’ve just been too busy. Lastly, I use Quicken for Windows–frankly the Mac version sucks! The Mac version has sucked for decades now, the UI is very un-Mac-like (it’s not simple nor easy to use). So, in order for me to use Quicken, I either need to go to my desktop PC (which gets hardly any use now) or fire up a virtual machine on my Mac. (There’s an announcement of an upgraded Quicken Mac coming in 2010, and it looks better at least.)

So summarize, here are the reasons why I haven’t been really using Quicken…

• Hassle to run (I need to use a VM to run Windows)
• Tedious (I have to go out of my way to upload my primary credit card, and enter cash transactions by hand)
• Time to keep it up to date (or reasonably so to be useful)

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Given that I haven’t really been using Quicken, I thought I might as well try out Mint.com, and start fresh. Yes, I could try and track down the data transfer problem, or I could use Quicken Online, but why not try the “new” product that’s the Quicken-killer. (Aside, Mint.com (history) was acquired by Intuit and the founder became the VP in-charge of all of the Intuit personal finance products including Quicken. So I also believe Quicken will probably transition to the Mint.com way of doing things sometime later this year.) And the new year is a great time to start!

I’ve spent about 3 hours or so with Mint.com and here have been my experiences.

• I’m up and running, and we’ll see how things go.
• It was kind of a pain to get my primary credit card to show up in the system. There are six possible “banks” to select for my card…none of them seemed to work. I have a second credit card with the same bank that did show up. That was about an hour of the first 1.5 hours of setting up my account. Then magically, when I logged in today (about 24 hours later), the account was there. Uh, ok. Mint would have been a non-starter without my primary credit card.
• Don’t fight the categorization scheme. In Quicken I set up multiple detailed categories and sub-categories. Mostly because I didn’t like the way Quicken did things 20 years ago. Now, after going through a “simpler is better” phase, just use the ones that Mint recommends. Though I can’t figure out when/how I can add a new category–it seems that when I try and add multiple sub-categories in a high-level category I always end up overwriting the one I just created. That is to say, I seem to be able to only have one custom sub-category. I’ll keep looking into this one.
• Use tags to do the customization of your expenses. Use categories as they are intended by Mint, use tags to assign them to a type of expense. So, I travel for work and for over a decade I have identified charges as work-related travel. Use tags at Mint to do this, not categories. An example. I go to “Random Restaurant” while traveling. In the Mint transaction view, set it’s category to “Restaurant”. Then, “Edit Detail” and assign a tag of “Work-related”. Now I can see what I spent on “Restaurant”s and then filter based on tag for “Work-related” or exclude it.
• Mint doesn’t really have a good way of handling cash transactions. You can’t setup a Cash account and hand enter data. They do have a workaround that isn’t really satisfying.
  

  Mint has a feature called Split which allows you to split a single transaction into multiple transactions, each able to be named and categorized. While we don’t support adding cash transactions, the same result can usually be achieved by splitting any cash withdrawals from your bank. For example, if you withdraw $100 at the ATM, spend $60 on dinner, $20 on a movie, and $20 on parking, you can later find your ATM withdrawal in Mint.com, and split it into 3 transactions. We automatically split out the ATM fee for you.

  Mint.com FAQ

  What I don’t like about this, is that by doing this the dumb way, I lose the notation that the cash originally came as part of an ATM Withdrawal. So, for the moment (and yes this is “not simple”) I append the vendor after “ATM Withdrawal”. Hrm, perhaps I should just add an “ATM” tag instead, I’ll have to think about that one. (There’s a recent blog post that says a bit about how Cash transactions will be handled in a merged Mint/Quicken online offering.)

• Mint makes answers the most common questions (presumably) very easy to find, and they make it easy to contact Mint directly. What they don’t do is make it easy to find the support forums where users might have already had the same problem as you and answered the question already. You can find a link from their main website under “About:Help”, but once you’re logged in, I can’t find a link from the “Help” system.
• Mint seems to be a little schizophrenic about when/if it will “hide” transactions from a given account. I’m trying to suppress the display of one account, and it shows as hidden, but it still shows up in my transaction views. I’ll give it a bit to see if it finally hides itself.
• I found a tip on how to exclude tags from a search “-tag:tagname” which I think will come in handy for quick searches. (It’s easy to exclude them more globally.)

I’ll check back in, in 3-6 months to give an update.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]