How I convinced my wife that mint.com wouldn't ruin us

Personal finance made easy

Some quick history About two years ago I read about this great free personal money management site mint.com. I immediately punched in all our bank login information, setup budgets, etc. I showed my wife my accomplishments with a big grin and got only a stern "What the hell are you thinking, that's ALL of our financial information in ONE place!" in return. Cancel, Delete, Remove account. 


On to Quicken and it's boring interface and crappy reports (mac version, it really is terrible). Then 6 months ago I dropped my wallet in a parking lot, the good samaritan that found it took my debit card to the same gas station and rang up nearly $900 in charges for... something. With the realization that perhaps paying for everything out of our checking account wasn't the best idea we decided to move to credit cards for daily expenses. Aha, an opening! Now we could sign back up for Mint and only give it access to our credit accounts, giving some distance between our immediate funds and any potential for online theft. I just had to convince my wife. 




Credit Situation So now we have a joint checking account, a joint Visa account, and older individual Visa and Amex accounts. The checking account is used strictly for income, bill pay, and transferring money to external savings. This presents a budgetting problem however, what used to be a simple task of reviewing the amount available in checking to decide if we were doing good that month became a hassle of comparing current and future checking balances against current card balances and due dates. Here's my in.


Mint.com to the rescue "Honey" I said, "We can use Mint to create and track budgets, goals, savings and everything in between without exposing our checking account AND they just released this great Android app for checking everything on the go!". With a sigh and the 'look' I got the OK. This excellent article by Gina Trapani titled "Why I Stopped Being Paranoid and Started Using Mint" didn't hurt anything, either. I actually have come around to my wife's line of thinking that we were too exposed before (having your wallet stolen made me paranoid). Our compromise however I think is a great way to minimize risk while gaining access to some killer features.


Caveats So not linking your main checking account with Mint has some drawbacks. The main issue is one that cripples the core of Mint; automation. I now have to manually add our income and bill pay expenses in to Mint, but really this is only about a dozen transactions a month, so no big deal. Hopefully down the line Mint will introduce a CSV based import mechanism, this will make it even easier (though still not automatic!) to update this information.


Successes There are two areas where Mint shines; budgets and it's newest feature Goals. Budgetting is going to take another month or so of data before I really get it nailed down. Goals on the other hand, is an exceptional service from the get go. I now know exactly how much we need to contribute per month to reach our emergency fund goal and have automated banking transfers so we don't even think about it. Could I have done this without Mint? Of course I could have, but I didn't. I also know exactly how much I need to feel safe for next year's taxes and have created the same automated transfers to reach it. The only issue I have is that Goals must be linked to a single savings account and one account can not be used for multiple goals (I have a feeling this is to boost their affiliate program potential, and I'm okay with that). I'd also like the ability to setup a Goal to track paying off a loan early, I don't see that feature as of yet.

Further thoughts from fatherfolk co-editor Aaron...

When my wife and I got married we consolidated our savings and direct deposit into one account, the Navy Federal Credit Union. NFCU offers a great banking service, but the lousy web interface combined with a lack of brick and mortar locations made keeping track of our finances online inconvenient. We started using mint.com to track our total financial health and have actually saved more money because of it. Just knowing that my wife will be looking over our transactions causes me think twice before throwing down three bucks for a latte or an Android app. Having all of our expenditures categorized has allowed us to track our spending on specific luxuries like eating out from month to month and even compare it to the national average. The ability to instantly access our own information has led to a greater sense of financial control and healthy frugality. An experience I don't think we would have gotten from a less than full commitment to online banking through mint.