Loading...Mint (mint.com) is the flagship budgeting tool… apparently.
Mint.com
Unfortunately I am an Australian without an American bank account so my experience of Mint.com is short and unproductive.
I can register for the site, faking a US postcode by entering 90210 (which must be vastly over subscribed on Mint.com by foreigners who watched TV in the 90s). However after confirming my email address and next step in the Mint.com process is entering login details for your bank account. There is reassurance that this is a totally secure process and that any American bank you care to belong to is supported.
My Australian bank is not.
Without a supported American bank account I can get no further into the Mint system. I can only talk about Mint in a theoretical sense. From here on in is speculation.
Obviously having automated access to your bank statements is fundamental to the way Mint works. The user also sets up a budget with categories and spending goals. As transactions appear on your linked accounts Mint captures and categorises them. First it tries to match the transactions against transactions the user has categorised in the past, if it cannot find a pattern to follow it asks the user for a category and learns from that input. Eventually the Mint system should be able to automatically categorise most of your usual statement transactions.
When it comes to non-statement transactions, for example those things you pay for with cash, I am not sure what Mint does, but I assume it must have some way of capturing these.
I do have some concerns about fully automated recording of expenses. Aside from the fact that to achieve this you have to give your online banking details to Mint and all the security concerns that raises, I question whether taking the user out of the expense recording process is a good thing. In my own experience one of the most powerful impacts manual budgeting has had on me is that having to note where every cent goes makes me pause and think about spending it to start with.
If anyone has firsthand experience with Mint I would love to hear exactly how it works and your opinion of it.