Giving Mint another chance.

I was actually a part of the private beta for Mint a few months ago, back then there was actually an NDA to where you couldn’t blog about or post any screenshots of the insides of Mint. I canceled my account shortly after being invited because although it appeared to be a useful tool I didn’t find that I had a real need for it.

Now that Mint has been made public and I’m sure many improvements and features were added I decided to give it another shot. I have a good budget in place but I need to get stricter with my spending habits. Right now it feels like I fulfill my monthly obligations and then blow the rest, while I may be doing it half right I find myself thinking about all of the money I could have if I were to just spend a little wiser.

I signed up for a new account and easily added my checking, savings, PayPal and IRA. The creepy ability to download all of your transactions and balances from your personal accounts is neat but the organization and analysis tools are the big selling features with Mint. It’s amazing what you will learn about your spending habits with just a few minutes of playing around.

Mint doesn’t quite have all of the tool’s I need to become a complete budgeting solution, I would like the alerts to be more customizable so I could say alert myself of an upcoming bill or the virus that is my car insurance payment. But it’s good enough to give an overview of posted transaction history so you can adjust spending for the future which for some is something worth looking into. Take a look for yourself.