RetireAge50
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
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If people are worried about security I guess they can't use Quicken either? This would be even more vulnerable as any good hacker can get to your personal computer.
Intuit Mint yes? no?
- Thread starter imoldernu
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explanade
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
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A lot of these institutions explicitly allow Quicken/Intuit Direct Connect.
That means they implicitly allow you to access your accounts through Quicken/Intuit.
If there's language disclaiming liability by the institutions when you access your account through Quicken/Intuit, I'd like to see it. Would be odd that they provide Direct Connect access but deny liability.
Doesn't Intuit own Mint? Is it not using the same service?
That means they implicitly allow you to access your accounts through Quicken/Intuit.
If there's language disclaiming liability by the institutions when you access your account through Quicken/Intuit, I'd like to see it. Would be odd that they provide Direct Connect access but deny liability.
Doesn't Intuit own Mint? Is it not using the same service?
Fean
Dryer sheet aficionado
Yes, Intuit bought Mint. However, some (but not all!) financial institutions make a big distinction between Quicken and Mint with regard to liability for unauthorized access to your account. These institutions specifically prohibit you from distributing your passwords to a third party. Mint is a third party. Quicken running locally on a computer you theoretically control is not a third party.
You can certainly debate whether or not such a distinction is valid in today's environment. In my opinion, the magnitude of the technical risks for Mint and Quicken are roughly comparable. Nevertheless, the issue isn't about pure technical risks. It's about liability. If you violate a security policy for your financial institution by giving your login credentials to a third party, then you are on very shaky ground if something would ever happen to your account -- even if in reality the third party wasn't responsible for the unauthorized access.
I agree that financial aggregators are invaluable. I truly hope that more institutions recognize this and move to a read-only protocol that supports third party aggregators such as Mint and Personal Capital. Until that happens, it is prudent to read the fine print for any account you link to a third party site. Based on what you find for your particular situation, it may be safer from a liability standpoint to stick with something like Quicken until your financial institutions change their policies.
-Fean
You can certainly debate whether or not such a distinction is valid in today's environment. In my opinion, the magnitude of the technical risks for Mint and Quicken are roughly comparable. Nevertheless, the issue isn't about pure technical risks. It's about liability. If you violate a security policy for your financial institution by giving your login credentials to a third party, then you are on very shaky ground if something would ever happen to your account -- even if in reality the third party wasn't responsible for the unauthorized access.
I agree that financial aggregators are invaluable. I truly hope that more institutions recognize this and move to a read-only protocol that supports third party aggregators such as Mint and Personal Capital. Until that happens, it is prudent to read the fine print for any account you link to a third party site. Based on what you find for your particular situation, it may be safer from a liability standpoint to stick with something like Quicken until your financial institutions change their policies.
-Fean
timemoveson
Recycles dryer sheets
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Excellent food for thought
In this thread regarding risks. I won't try to add anything as it would only be opinion based not fact driven. In terms of Mint's usability, I have a strong positive opinion formed through focused use over the last 8 months.
I'm finding it invaluable as a budget tracker/spend tracking tool that is showing me where the money is really going with a minimum of effort. I am using it exclusively for this purpose and have no interest in investment or debt tracking in there, nor am I tracking separate small business expenses in here although that would be simple to do as well. So, personal tracking of our family spending is the focus. I'm actually finding it enjoyable to see where the admittedly very large amount of money we spend is going in relevant and detailed categories. For us, this is for FIRE planning and I would offer that this or a similar routine is mandatory preparation to understand and tune spending before you make decisions.
In our case we live significantly below means so I'm not trying to "budget" using the tool. I'm trying to really see where the money is going and fix problems. We have made and acted on several revelations already.
The orientation is towards the future when our income will be investment return driven and not nearly so large (but still large by any standard). We will have fixed problems and be in a good position to have the diligence to not overspend and if we do, fix it quickly. Mint does the classification work for you quite effortlessly and learns, and gets it right on its own the next time it sees the same or a similar transaction. Minor manual intervention gets the fixes in when needed and then you are 95+% on automatic. The trend graphics, computations and transaction registers are powerful and drill right down to transaction level to make changes, manual additions or fix mistakes.
Mint is really ideal for my application. The fact that it is free is almost unreal but a direct function of the Internet economy. I would certainly pay for it.
In this thread regarding risks. I won't try to add anything as it would only be opinion based not fact driven. In terms of Mint's usability, I have a strong positive opinion formed through focused use over the last 8 months.
I'm finding it invaluable as a budget tracker/spend tracking tool that is showing me where the money is really going with a minimum of effort. I am using it exclusively for this purpose and have no interest in investment or debt tracking in there, nor am I tracking separate small business expenses in here although that would be simple to do as well. So, personal tracking of our family spending is the focus. I'm actually finding it enjoyable to see where the admittedly very large amount of money we spend is going in relevant and detailed categories. For us, this is for FIRE planning and I would offer that this or a similar routine is mandatory preparation to understand and tune spending before you make decisions.
In our case we live significantly below means so I'm not trying to "budget" using the tool. I'm trying to really see where the money is going and fix problems. We have made and acted on several revelations already.
The orientation is towards the future when our income will be investment return driven and not nearly so large (but still large by any standard). We will have fixed problems and be in a good position to have the diligence to not overspend and if we do, fix it quickly. Mint does the classification work for you quite effortlessly and learns, and gets it right on its own the next time it sees the same or a similar transaction. Minor manual intervention gets the fixes in when needed and then you are 95+% on automatic. The trend graphics, computations and transaction registers are powerful and drill right down to transaction level to make changes, manual additions or fix mistakes.
Mint is really ideal for my application. The fact that it is free is almost unreal but a direct function of the Internet economy. I would certainly pay for it.
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