I-tech: Mint.com

In Log In’s regular feature I-tech, I describe how I am using technology to make my life more efficient, fun and interesting. Today I review Mint.com, a free personal finance website. To answer any questions I had about the site, I chatted with Aaron Patzer, Mint.com’s founder and CEO.

Over the last several months, I have watched interviews with retirees as they mourn investing with Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. The stories of people entrusting their money to one entity brought me back to memories of my grandfather.

When I was a kid I used to hear my grandfather talk about banks. He expected the bank managers and tellers to greet him by name when he entered the doors. If the employees did not know him, he would threaten to pull his money out and move it to one of the other banks in town. He got a laugh out of this because he also secretly kept his money in the other banks. I carry on his semi-paranoid legacy.

True or not, I tend to believe that on Wall Street and Main Street there is a Madoff on every corner, and through the years this philosophy has been proven correct: the Depression, the 80’s S & L crises, and our current woes.

The problem with my strategy is that my money is all over the place, and tracking performance and bank records wastes an enormous amount of time. Given the way people invest nowadays, and the way we all change jobs regularly, I am guessing that my situation is not an unusual one as our money—or what’s left of it–is spread into different accounts and 401K vehicles.

After being too afraid to even look at my portfolio for the first part of the year, I bit the bullet and decided to take an active interest in organizing my finances and look into ways to cut costs. In the course of working through my books, a friend suggested Mint.com. While I used early incarnations of Microsoft Money and Intuit’s Quicken, I found them somewhat cumbersome because entering my expenditures was incredibly time-consuming and it was not the way I wanted to spend a Sunday afternoon. Aaron Patzer, Mint.com’s 28-year-old CEO, experienced the same frustrations and decided to create a product to automate this process. (After entering your financial information, the site automatically downloads it.)

Besides the ease of seeing most of your financial life on one screen, Mint.com tries to create site stickiness by giving money-saving tips. The economic downturn has created a cottage industry in saving money and Mint.com not only helps users track expenses it gives suggestions on how to save money on credit cards and savings accounts. For example, it will tell you about more advantageous credit cards, or indicate that moving money from a zero interest checking account to an interest-bearing one will earn money. The site gives specific brand suggestions for credit cards and savings accounts. This is a good feature, but I had my doubts about its validity: my skeptical nature made me wonder if Mint.com advertisers were given more play compared to non-advertisers; Patzer assured me that the money saving features have complete validity: all seven credit card companies are on Mint (not all have deals with the company) and “placement has everything to do with the best interest rate, not sponsorship.”

Mint.com has been a successful startup. In August, at the beginning of the economic slide, Mint.com had 400,000 users, and now it has 1.2 million. Because of a deal with Yahoo (Mint.com has been on the MyYahoo section for the last two weeks). Patzer told me that he expects 2.5 million users by the end of the year.

Mint.com helped me track my money, and it also makes good suggestions for cutting expenses (although this feature needs some improvement). While it took me about a day to get my account numbers in order and figure out passwords for my credit cards so Mint.com can access my financial life, it has really been a helpful product; I can find my financial information in one place, and it is always up-to-date. One example of a nice feature: Mint.com shoots me an email when an excessive ATM fee has been charged to my account.

Putting my financial life onto a Website concerned me, but Mint.com never asks for personal information, and Patzer assured me that the company owns its own servers, which are in an undisclosed location, the company hires white knight hackers to try to penetrate the system (Patzer says they have been unsuccessful), and the hard-drives are military grade so if they are stolen from the facility they do not work.

I really like Mint.com, but it is missing a few key elements, such as integration of utilities and phone bills. (Patzer says phone integration will happen soon.) I would like to see more many saving tips and offers on the site, too. Like any decent money management software, Mint.com helps me see where I am spending my money. Unfortunately, it is not always accurate. Mint.com bases its categories on the Yellow Pages. Patzer said it is 93 percent accurate so if I buy the latest novel at my local book store, it should be listed in the appropriate category. Unfortunately, I found that several purchases were not listed correctly and I was told that I had gone over-budget on certain expenses when, in reality, the purchases had been inaccurately categorized. This is a difficult problem to solve, and I didn’t really blame Mint.com, but it made me question the accuracy of my budget expenditures.

Conclusion: Overall, I found Mint.com to be an elegant, easy-to-use product, which simplifies the ability to track finances, and—according to Mint.com’s CEO—the product will continue to evolve with more money-saving features.