MoneyMerc

[Photo: QuintanaRoo]

I’ve written previously about the usefulness of Mint.com for tracking spending.  Recently they’ve released a whole bunch of investment-tracking features that allow you to see all your money, investments and assets in one place.  This eliminates the need for Fidelity’s Full View, which does pretty much the same thing, but requires that you have a Fidelity account.  It still leaves a couple things to be desired for the financial planner in me, but for most it will do very well, and I highly recommend it.

What is Mint?

For those who haven’t tried it yet, Mint.com is a financial management web site which you put in all your log-in details of accounts, and it automatically logs into all of them for you every day and downloads the activity.  Then it takes each transaction and categorizes it for you.  This is insanely useful if you “don’t know where all the money goes.”  It gives you all kinds of fancy pie-charts on your spending, integrates budgets into each category, and even sends reminders to pay bills (if you don’t have them automated already).

OK, yeah that sounds a little scary to give out all those log-in details.  To make you feel better, they go to extreme lengths to keep all your info safe.  Good enough for me…

If you tried Mint a year ago and weren’t happy with it, I recommend trying it again.  The categorization and other features have gotten much better since the initial version.

My Favorite Mint Features

Spending Trends

This is the most obvious one, and is the real reason to use a tool like this in the first place.  It allows you to look at spending categories over chosen time periods, and to drill down and see the details of what make up those categories (for example, my “Lunch at Work” category shows that I spend more at “Dishes” than at Subway.  But I go to Dishes way less often!  Something I will now consider when deciding where to eat…)

I especially like the ‘SpendSpace’ area, where you can compare your spending to others in your area.  For example, here’s how much we spend on food and dining compared to others in NYC (yikes!):

Net Income

Here’s an easy way to spot a big problem – do you spend more than you earn?  How often? This bar graph in the lower left of the Overview page gives you a quick look.

Of course, if your income or expenses are uneven, this might have less value to you.  But the income/spend/net numbers at the bottom are good ones to be constantly aware of.

“Quick” Budgets

Mint automatically recognizes about how much you spend on certain categories and adds these budgets to the main screen.  This makes it easy to see where you are off track in a given month – spent $50 more on groceries than usual?  wow, why is that?  So if you hate budgets, this is a good way to still get a handle on your spending trends.

Investments

The biggest benefit to this is I can see all my accounts in one place.  This includes assets (my car) and liabilities (my mortgage).  So I can get a total picture of my net worth in seconds.

Comparison – You can easily compare the performance of your portfolio to S&P500 and other indicies.  Be careful though – your risk profile and asset allocation might not be expected to match one of these indicies.  But it’s good to get an idea of how to compare.

Best Performers/Worst Performers – this view let’s me see what’s working and what’s really stinking in my portfolio.  If I’m looking to get rid of something, I come here first.

Some issues. The investments tool still has some things to be desired.  On the Allocation screen, it would be great if it was broken up by actual asset type, as this would help you with your asset allocation.  For example, a bond mutual fund contains bonds, while a stock mutual fund contains stocks.  These are very different investments, and fall into two of the biggest asset-allocation categories.  However, in Mint both show up as “mutual funds”.

Another problem with the investment feature is it doesn’t grab historical transactions.  So you should add accounts asap, and then as time passes the features will become more useful.

Ways to Save

Mint is free.  The way they make money is by making you offers that will save you money (but make money for their partners), like increasing your bank interest rate, or decreasing the rate on your credit card.  The offers are very unobtrusive.  But I have yet to use one, mainly because I already spend a lot of time finding the best savings rates and because I never have a credit card balance.   But it might be useful for you.

Are you using Mint?  What do you think of it?  Are you using it in a cool way I haven’t talked about?  Share it with us in the comments!