tracking expenses with online site

[tightasadrum]

Has anyone used mint.com to track expenses? I like the concept, but have some questions.

1. Is it secure?

2. Does it work as well as they say it does at budgeting, automatically grouping expenses, and offering good alternatives to your spending?

If anyone has tried it, I'd like to hear your opinion. If there is already a post about it, I apologize. Let me know.

 

[HobbyDave]

I think there was a thread, but I don't want to go look for it. I mentioned in that thread that I use Wesabe, which is similar to Mint.com

https://www.wesabe.com/

I wrote a little review here awhile ago: Wesabe Review

 

[HobbyDave]

Oh, and as for secure, not certain how secure it is, I enter in my numbers manually instead of letting any system have access to my bank accounts directly. They still have my financial info, but not my account numbers. Makes me feel a little better.

Don't know about Mint's features. For Wesabe, it has plenty of features I don't use. I just use it to categorize my expenses, so I can find the obvious points of "pain".

 

[tightasadrum]

But if you have to manually enter your data, it sort of misses the point I think. The interesting thing was that "mint" supposedly collects the information automatically. You don't have to enter anything.

But unless I have more confidence in the security of my information, I can't turn my bank accounts over to the system either.

 

[HobbyDave]

Yeah, I personally don't trust anything other than a mega-corp with my financial information (not that I trust them either, but I think they're less likely to do something illegal)

When using Wesabe, I didn't type in my info, though it was a manual process. You can go to your bank & c-card websites and download files containing your activity for the last XX days (90+). Then you use a page to upload that info, and bam, you have it all in there.

So not quite "poof, magic numbers", but it only took maybe 5 minutes the next time I needed to do it once I knew the steps.