Mint.com

[DeborahB]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoolChange I have used Moneydance for several years to track spending and investments as well as to reconcile accounts. I have never really been a budgeter. I don't really like to spend money; so, I have never seen the need for myself. While I have considered making the move to GnuCash (Free Accounting Software | GnuCash), I will probably just upgrade my Moneydance license at some point. (I really like the idea of using Open Source software; but, Moneydance is cross platform, easy to use, familiar (to me now), and doesn't force me into an upgrade. So, I will probably throw a few dollars at the Moneydance team in the near future.)

Thanks - I have been using MS Money to track my investment portfolio and they are stopping online updates so I either have to update manually or find another program...!

[CoolChange]

Quote:

Originally Posted by thinker25 Thanks - I have been using MS Money to track my investment portfolio and they are stopping online updates so I either have to update manually or find another program...!

For what it is worth, I used both MS Money and Quicken before Moneydance. And, I like Moneydance better than either of the others.

Obviously, your milage may vary.

The convenience of sites like Mint.com are offset by single point of failure fears for me: If someone breaches security at my local bank, my online bank, or one of my brokers, it could be a headache. But, if someone breached a consolidated Mint.com type account and gained access to ALL of my financial accounts, we move from headache to migraine or worse.

Yes, same issue with having all my data in an app. on my PC; but, I keep the PC fairly physically secure and use strong passwords to encrypt the data files on it. And, I am trying to get better about regular system backups.

[DeborahB]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CoolChange For what it is worth, I used both MS Money and Quicken before Moneydance. And, I like Moneydance better than either of the others. Obviously, your milage may vary. The convenience of sites like Mint.com are offset by single point of failure fears for me: If someone breaches security at my local bank, my online bank, or one of my brokers, it could be a headache. But, if someone breached a consolidated Mint.com type account and gained access to ALL of my financial accounts, we move from headache to migraine or worse. Yes, same issue with having all my data in an app. on my PC; but, I keep the PC fairly physically secure and use strong passwords to encrypt the data files on it. And, I am trying to get better about regular system backups.

Thanks very much, that's very helpful info about Moneydance and also Quicken. The thing I like about Moneydance - which I haven't started using - is that it appears to use yahoo finance for the quotes. It doesn't attach to your investment or bank accounts. Please let me know if this is incorrect.

I do NOT like to keep my financial info online, for the same reason you stated - a single point of failure. I look at it online, I do transactions online... but for example MS Money does not have my account numbers plugged into it, and I just named the accounts in ways that made sense for me.

I don't need a budgeting tool but keeping track of my investments on a daily basis is pretty much a way of life for me. I enjoy it. So any tool where budgeting is the main feature isn't what I need.

I'm going to mess with Moneydance after I retire in a few weeks so if I need to do cleanup and so on, I have time. This assumes I will be less busy - which isn't likely but at least I can prioritize it if I need to.

[ESRwannabe]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tomcat98 Just wanted to see if anyone uses Mint.com for their budgeting and spending tracking. Would be curious to hear the good and bad. Tomcat98

I have never tried it. It seems too risky to me. To track my expenses and investments I wrote my own software to automate the process.

At the end of every month I go to my bank and credit card websites and download the data. Then I run my program on it to parse it up, categorize the data, and add it all up. It spits the data out to a text file.

For my investments I edit a text file every time I buy or sell, and then run a program on it which spits out my AA, percentage costs/divs/yield, etc. That gets written to a text file also.

I like keeping my data in text files. No worries about it becoming unusable due to software discontinuation or the company going out of business and closing down their website where all your data is stored.

[CoolChange]

Quote:

Originally Posted by thinker25 Thanks very much, that's very helpful info about Moneydance and also Quicken. The thing I like about Moneydance - which I haven't started using - is that it appears to use yahoo finance for the quotes. It doesn't attach to your investment or bank accounts. Please let me know if this is incorrect.

I believe this is true; although, I generally just update my values quarterly or semi-anually whenever I reconcile my PC to my online statements. Values for any non-public funds, etc. (such as those in many retirement accounts) have to entered manually. (At least, this is how it works on my very old copy of this software.) You may have to install an additional (free) plug-in to get the Yahoo! quotes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by thinker25 I'm going to mess with Moneydance after I retire in a few weeks so if I need to do cleanup and so on, I have time. This assumes I will be less busy - which isn't likely but at least I can prioritize it if I need to.

You may run into some issues if you try to import a lot of history from other applications; but, I think you will encounter these issues with whatever you move to. Mine were actually fairly minor going to Moneydance. And, you can play with it for free for a while.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ESRwannabe I like keeping my data in text files. No worries about it becoming unusable due to software discontinuation or the company going out of business and closing down their website where all your data is stored.

This was actually one of the reasons I moved to Moneydance initially. It keeps data in XML files which I could easily pull into a database, reformat as plain text, etc. Even though I have not actually done any of the analysis I had planned for this data, I do like keeping the option open for a future project.

[WanderALot]

I just can't get myself to enter all my usernames/passwords into Mint. We hardly ever kept a budget for a lot time, but in the last few weeks I've been getting into using wesabe.com. I don't enter in any of my usernames/passwords; I just upload my monthly data (Money/Quicken format) and setup categories. It automatically puts most of my transactions into categories that I setup and I manually enter in cash stuff. It helps that about 95% of our transactions are on one credit card, with the remainder in one checking account, so only two uploads and about 10 min of characterizing transactions that didn't get detected each month. It's got nice graphs but not as nice as Mint from what I hear.

I like it so far, we'll see how it works long term. I originally wanted a desktop app, but I see the benefit of a web app.

[WM]

I don't know if someone put this up elsewhere, but I just ran across this blog post at the NY Times discussing whether it's ok to trust Mint. I found it informative. FWIW, their answer was yes.

[Sarah in SC]

Thought I'd resurrect an old thread on Mint rather than start a new one.
I just decided to try it out this week, as part of my plan to gradually phase out my constant need to sit down at the elderly home computer and update manually all my Quicken 2006 data, though I love it so.

I think Mint.com speaks to my finally graduating from using that single point home computer for all my internet and finance needs to something I can look at while traveling, share with DH easily, and not have to wait for the computer to warm up!

I doubt I'll abandon my manual system of receipt entry just yet, because I'm hopelessly old school, but the ease of use and information at a glance is hard to beat.

What I love so far: all accounts are updated, from 5 different custodians/banks/credit unions. I can see what transactions have posted, without logging into all those different website.

It updates our investment accounts daily, unlike my quicken, because I have an old version that no longer talks to the outside world so I've been entering prices manually.

Although I haven't played with it much, it has budgeting that can give you a big heads up on the usual suspects, like entertaining and dining out. It might help our impulse control to see how much we've already spent on restaurants before we decide to stop off for a quick bite on the way home.

All in all, I can see this becoming the way I keep up with my accounts daily, with less frequent use of Quicken, though I expect I will still do my holy grail of manual reconciliation each month, probably til I die.

[pimpmyretirement]

I use Mint. I like the up to date net worth total and the ability to see all my financial transactions in a single queue.

I find it is a poor tool for budgeting and tracking. Too many features look good at first, but then as you start digging in, subtle issues appear that make your records inaccurate. For instance, transactions from one of my checking accounts are duplicated sometimes.

I don't have much concern about the security. I figure it is a certainty that at some point, one or more of my accounts will be breached. All my accounts send emails on major transactions and I monitor them all at least weekly. Mint aids in this, which I consider to more than make up for the user name and password disclosure.