This is my second week of handing my personal financial picture over to Mint.com. How do I like it so far?
In a word: fantastic.
The iPhone app is cool, although it doesn't show the full range of pie charts and number crunching available in the full web site version of Mint.com, it does give you a great snapshot of your monthly budget, and total cash (deposits, investments, etc) against your total outstanding debts (credit cards, mortgage, student loans, etc).
This has already had a tremendous psychological impact on how I spend.
Seeing an almost real-time ticker of your outstanding debts makes you think twice about spending $3.87 on an iced white mocha when there is a perfectly good pot of hot coffee back at the office.
Secondly, I like knowing at a glance exactly what I'm worth.
There's no room for self-delusion or avoiding reality with Mint.com. If you're spending too much on frivolous things, it will very quickly become apparent.
Although some users may not like handing over their financial institution usernames and passwords to a third-party service like Mint, I don't mind the "loss" of privacy. I think greater visibility of my finances is a plus, not a minus.
Also, Mint.com is now owned by Intuit (makers of TurboTax, Quickbooks, etc) so I don't think security is much of an issue. This is just my opinion and your risk tolerance for handing over your bank account details to a free service may vary.
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