Mint Money Management
7 Comments
I’ve been using Mint.com lately to keep tabs of my financials, and aside from GMail, it’s probably the neatest and most useful “Web 2.0″ app out there right now. I’ve tried using MS Money on and off in the past, and always eventually quit because syncing transactions was never an easy process. It’s probably a lot better now, but basically if I forgot to manually sync up now and then (which I often did), then transactions would potentially get lost, because the export from my bank only provided a limited window of past transactions.
As a hosted web application that exists out there on the Internet, Mint helps solve this issue by basically being “always on” and doing everything in the background. It does all the syncing and categorizing of transactions automatically without me having to manually open or launch anything, or even worry about keeping my computer turned on. It’s a pretty neat feature and probably the one I find most helpful.
But, it is a little scary to have all my financial data sitting in a server somewhere out there, so it would be nice if they offered some kind of “offline” version. Perhaps built with a framework such Adobe AIR, Google Gears, or Mozilla Prism. I don’t think I would mind if most of the application actually resided on Mint’s servers (since hosted apps are always up-to-date), but just as long as I had the option to (periodically?) save my own private data to my own local computer I think I would be happy… (for now).
Laity Lodge Youth Camp
Parkside Services
South Shore Baptist
Parkside Youth
Military Ministry
Campus Ministry
Know H2O
IFCJ
China Aid
C3 Missions
7 comments
Joe -
Thanks for the tip (read your blog on Razoo originally).
My wife and I also have the syncing problem, so this looks to be a great solution to it.
We’ll check it out,
Sebastian
i use mvelopes per the frey’s recommendation. it’s web based but it works using flash which drives me nuts a bit but not too much (have been using it for a year now). wondering if i should switch…
i am highly suspicious of the “no need to balance your account forever” claim.
The security issues are rather worrying - big brother, let alone the IRS, Joey the 13 yr hacker, and countless others will be watching.
I’ve been using Quicken for a little over a year (ever since I decided that it was time to keep tabs on my finances, being a perpetually poor college student). Unfortunately Quicken is a bloated piece of junk that hardly works most of the time (by hardly works, I mean that the online account sync never works for my bank).
I have looked into several alternatives, including Mint (I’ve had an account there for several months). Yes, the potential privacy risks are concerning, but more annoying to me is the lack of certain features, such as creating offline accounts (to keep track of cash, loans, etc), along with a few other missing features.
However, the platform does show promise, and the more annoyed I get with Quicken, the sooner I hope they add some new features.
Thank you.
I have been using QUICKEN for over 17 years. It was a revolutionary program, reasonably priced and worth purchasing a computer if only for Quicken. It can be very involved, and downloading account figures vary, it seems, with each financial institution, but can be figured out IF you want to spend the time to do so. MINT may be the solution for that problem in QUICKEN, but my data managed in QKN is in my PC, not out there in cyberspace. That is a concern.
sohbet
Leave a comment