Using Mint.com to cut through the financial static

December 9, 2008 · Posted in Personal Finance, Simplify, Student Loans · Comment

As the year comes to a close, it is always nice to take a look at the finances. Although I love tracking our finances using Microsoft Money, the level of detail doesn’t always provide a clear look at the underlying picture.

For example, our net worth is approximately the same as last year, but this is due to losses in our retirement accounts, which I am not overly concerned about. Since we are in our early 30’s, we make regular contributions and reallocate our holdings twice a year. It’s pretty much on auto-pilot.

But what about our debt? And our savings? Are we doing better than last year? Again, it is hard to tell with Microsoft Money. I have all of my business accounts listed, as well as our credit card that we use to make our monthly purchases (and then pay off in full each month). These accounts can give a skewed representation of our financial picture depending on the circumstances.

This is where Mint.com enters into the picture. Basically, it allows you to track your financial accounts online. This morning, I spent some time entering the login information for all of our accounts. Then, I used the “hide” function to get rid of all the accounts that were causing “financial static”. Now, when I log in, I can easily see the totals for the accounts which represent our true emergency savings, our credit card debt, and our student loan/mortgage debt.

As an added bonus, I am also able to quickly look at our credit cards that do not carry a balance to make sure that no mysterious charges have appeared. Given our recent experience with this, this feature alone makes it worth taking a look at Mint.com.

I wouldn’t use Mint.com for making a budget or tracking our detailed spending – I have already spent too much time with Microsoft Money to tweak it to my liking, and our finances are tracked in the program from 1999. But now I have another financial tool in my arsenal to help us keep focused on debt reduction, and I’m really excited!

Have you used Mint.com? If so, what do you use it for? Are you happy with your experience?