Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

I signed up for Mint.com, a personal finance manager, and I thought I’d post my reactions here. First, let’s walk through the process. You fill in your email address and passwords, and then almost immediately begin filling in sign-in information for the online banking service you use. The GUI is fast and intuitive:

Within minutes, Mint has pulled the most recent 132 transaction from four credit cards, a checking account, and paypal. They support hundreds of different accounts, from banking checking and savings, credit cards, macys and other store cards, as well as investment accounts. In the near future, they will support student loan accounts as well!

Yes, this is scary, but Mint claims they can keep you safe by not storing your banking login information themselves:

We ask for your online banking user name and passwords, but we do not see or store that information. That means no one at Mint, and no potential hackers of Mint.com, can access your banking credentials. Your online banking credentials are stored only with these institutions enabling Mint to automatically and securely update your transactions and saving you from updating, syncing or uploading financial information manually. All communication between Mint and its online financial service providers is encrypted using 128–bit SSL encryption, the financial industry standard for data protection.

The next step is to classify and review your transactions. Mint lets you put them in buckets–and naturally it will get a few wrong to start with–but you can set up rules to classify new transactions how you like. For example, I set one that sets any cheques with the amount of my rent to go into the rent bucket:

By doing this, you let them do some analysis on your spending or earning trends. Note, the trends feature appears to update daily, not in real time, so if you classify a bunch of transactions, it won’t update the trends page with your new categorization for some time. This is unfortunate, but probably necessary. This lets them make, say, a graph of your spending v.s. the average NY spender:

I guess I need to spend more money at Amazon and Best Buy to fit in these days. Lastly, there is their “ways to save” page, which is basically targeted affiliate ads with various banks. This is their revenue stream–getting you to sign up for new credit cards and open new accounts–so don’t trust anything it says:

The verdict? I love it, and I think it’s only going to get better. This is the new world, and services like Mint can make our lives infinitely easier! Please share your opinions about Mint.com, if you’ve ever experienced fraud after signing up, etc, below.

Update: There are some good reviews out there, too. PC Magazine says “Mint.com is a useful, intelligent, and free financial Web service that’s simple to set up and tracks your monetary life with little intervention on your part,” while Viewpoints has a single review which calls it “One of the best free money trackers on the Internet” and Girls Just Wanna Have Funds praises it for costing $50 less than MS Money.

So today I am depressed by the general state of affairs in the US stock market. It just wasn’t a happy day, with all the slightly less than shining Q2 reports coming out, and investors dumping stock and tanking the market. I think the following chart, from my Facebook Stock Quotes application, says it all:

There’s only 1 stock that actually went up today in my list of 12, and it’s Phantom! Phantom is the game console company which doesn’t have a product and is described by Wikipedia as:

On February 21, 2006, it was revealed that the Phantom gaming console was put on hold indefinitely. It was also revealed in an SEC filing that Infinium had lost over $62.7 million in 3 years, over half of which was spent on marketing the company and its products which have not yet made it to market. Over $24 million was spent on salaries and consultants with only $2.5 million going towards development. Infinium claimed that they still intended to release their “Lapboard” if their financial situation improved.[13] The “Lapboard” repeatedly missed release dates of the second quarter of 2006, October 2006 and November 2006.

What a world we live in! Maybe next week will be more “green” for America.

I just got the following error from Chase Bank:

We were unable to process your change. General MQ error (2007)

On the one hand, the errors are scary. On the other hand, I’m thrilled that JP Morgan Chase Bank One and Co. are using IBM’s Websphere MQ for reliable transmission of my account information!