May 5, 2008
Mint: Manage Your Personal Finance
Mint is a new free personal finance software that was released on the Web. Apparently, it is initially designed for the people reside in the US where a user need to enter the US zip code. Upon signing-up for Mint, you’ll able to use it as a single Web-based for all account types such as banks, credit cards, and credit unions. In order to download data to your Mint account, you’ll also need to enter the bank or credit card number. Currently, it supports more than 3,500 US financial institutions, such as Bank of America, Chase, Citibank Bank, HSBC, PayPal, just to name a few. Mint also supports investment account whereby you can fetch your personal data from your investment accounts such as Charles Schwab, E*Trade, Merrill Lynch, etc. More account types such as student loans and mortgages are on the way, probably available in June.
One notable feature Mint render is safety. If you’re connected to Mint and log into those of your bank accounts, Mint will automatically log you out if they find your account is being idle for 10 minutes, as all the data fetched from your bank accounts is sensitive data. The primary objective Mint offered to users is letting them handle their money in an efficient manner. How much money left in the accounts, how to do money budgeting yourself. An advanced alerting system is also being built into the system to alert users on issues such as unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills. In Mint’s About page, it seem that their next goal is to be a recommendation engine, if your balance in your bank is earning no interest, they might recommend a high interest rate savings account and you might earn some interest based on their suggestion.
Though Mint has many notable features pertaining to money management, it does not help a user to do money transferring or bill paying. You still need to do it by logging in to those accounts separately. What Mint can offer is their insights, by illustrating your money flowing in a pie chart or bar graph, you’ll be able to read your personal finance in this elegant way and help you to practice smarter in the future.
I’ll give Mint a real try in near future since my local bank is not in a list of Mint’s supported financial institutions. Stay tuned.
via [All Thing Digital]
hmm, interesting, but still - I guess I don’t see what is ‘better’ than Good reads here. perhaps you mentioned it in the article, but for some reason, I just don’t see anything that jumps out at me as a big ‘win’ for changing from Goodreads over to readernaught.
is it the abbility to buy from Amazon that would make me want to switch? that’s the only thing that I see that might differentiate it.
oh well, I’ll keep looking on the web to see if there is an article that mentions what sets readernaught apart from goodreads.
thanks for the basic info. though.
Wade -out.