GMR 124: Mint - It's free, but is it good?
Mint is one of the oldest and most widely used personal finance apps available today. It has a high number of features, but how good is it at helping you budget? In this episode of GMR, we put Mint up against the 4 Foundational Principles of a Budget to see how effective it is to help you budget successfully.
Show Notes
The 4 Foundational Principles of a Budget
· Assign Every Dollar
Zero Based Budget - Spend on Purpose
· Arrange Every Expense
7 to 9 Main Categories (housing)
Plus subcategories (rent, electricity, insurance, taxes)
· Allocate It Evenly
Surplus & Deficits rollover
Looks ahead - Future Forecasting
Annual view, not monthly.
· Adjust As Necessary
Tracking expenses often to ensure success.
In our survey, excel was used most, followed by a tie between YNAB & EveryDollar, and in third place for most used was Mint.com.
Mint
When you create a Mint account, the first thing it does is ask you to connect your bank account, credit cards, mortgage, and all your other financial accounts. It gives you eight options:
Chase
Discover
WellsFargo
American Express
US Bank
Capital One
Netflix
Paypal
Then it walks you through a tutorial:
Set up alerts
About to miss a payment
Unusual spending
Potential late fees
Set up to see the day your bills are due
Review Mint’s suggestions for your finances
Connect your credit score (free)
Create a Budget (yes, this is the 6th thing they recommend)
Set Goals (saving, retirement, debt pay-off)
Connect your investment accounts, can see the balances and know your approximate net worth
“Ways to Save” - this is where they market services to you (selling life insurance, car insurance, new credit cards, refinancing, brokerage accounts)
Has graphics and charts to see how you’re doing on monthly cash flow
“When the tutorial was done, the first thing I saw was a large banner to buy life insurance. This is how Mint makes money, they provide you with lots of free services, and encourage you to buy products through them.”
Samples of Ads
When I started Tracking Expenses, the first thing I see is an ad for Acorns Investing App.
When I’m creating the budget it’s showing me ads for Stash saving & investing App.
When I look at my Overview Page, it shows me an ad for TurboTax.
“Just starting out, you kind of start to realize that this isn’t really a budgeting software, it’s an overview of all your finances, with a clunky budgeting tool built-in.”
Pros
Pulling expenses from your bank and pulling bank account info is free. Most other tools you pay for this feature.
The downside is all the ads.
The downside is that it doesn’t seem to be keeping up with other budgeting software regarding the user interface, it’s clunky and not fun to use.
Decent ecosystem, all your accounts can be in one place, free credit score, blogs that educate you on different topics.
It’s a great place to see everything about your finances in one place, but not a great place to budget, in fact, the budgeting component kind of confuses the other uses of this tool.
CheckBox - Start each new month with the previous month's leftover amount is great!
Visual indicator green to orange to red to indicate where you are in relation to your spending when compared to the allocated amount.
You can split transactions when you’re tracking.
You can teach the Tracking Expenses feature to automatically categories expenses more correctly.
Love that it actually tracks “pending expenses” as well. Usually, budgeting software won’t recognize spending until it clears your credit card, but this will recognize even pending expenses.
Goals feature - pay off debt, save for a vacation, or a car replacement.
Nice options to see your progress.
It tells you how much you are saving in interest and when you will reach your goal (date)
Customizable - change the amount and it adjusts pay off date, interest save, etc.
This might be a great tool to use as a debt snowball, excluding the budget of course.
Bills - provides the option to set up recurring bills.
Alerts you when it’s due and the amount due.
Accounts (credit cards) are automatically added. Other bills you will need to add yourself by providing the login information for that merchant or provider.
You can see a list of bills that are due and a list of bills you’ve paid.
Cons
Starts you out by downloading all your transactions before you’ve built your budget. This was very overwhelming for me. Because I have to learn to approve and track expenses into categories I haven’t built yet. And the software has already created some budgeting categories based on my spending that has already happened, but that tracking isn’t necessarily accurate so now I’m having to change categories that have been created.
Moving money from one category to another - yes, but you need to manually adjust the budgeted amount for each category. This causes a problem since the original amount is lost and the newly adjusted amount carries to the next month.
It doesn’t really feel like they are expecting people to budget, live on a plan, and really manage their spending. It feels like the platform is built to give people a larger view of their overall finances.
Networth
Credit Info
Overview of investments
The interface is clunky and feels old. Can’t move categories around once you’ve created them. They are stuck in the order you originally created them in.
It gives a false sense that you’re doing a good job managing money, just because you can see all the numbers in one place.
The first thing I want to do is create my budget, build all my categories, but instead, I’m forced to deal with all the tracking and pre-built categories that might not make sense for my personal budget.
In the phone app, you have to scroll way down every time you want to access your budget. It’s not built into the tabs or set in an easy to access way. The budget is at the bottom, which means you have to scroll past all the advertisements to get to your finances.
If Mint has already created a category, like Clothing, you can’t create that category again. You have to use their subcategory, inside of their main category. This just means that things aren’t customizable in a simple and easy to use way. You have to learn to budget exactly the way they think of budgeting and it’s not intuitive all the time. Learning their nuances can be frustrating and when you’re creating a budget, and honestly creating a budget can be difficult anyway, this process makes you learn everything at once, along with a lot of nuances, which will cause most people to quit.
Does Mint align with The 4 Principles of a Budget?
Assign Every Dollar
Yes, you can create the budget from the top down.
Arrange Every Expense
Yes, but the main categories are set, you can’t create your own main categories or rename them. You can create your own subcategories, but you can’t move them after you’ve created them so you have to create it perfectly the first time which is unlikely.
Allocate It Evenly
Yes, overspending carries over.
Adjust As Necessary
Yes, but the tracking is clunkier than other apps, it doesn’t match to categories well and isn’t as intuitive or easy to drag and drop.
Although Mint passes the 4 Principles test, we would not recommend this tool as a budget software.
Starting this process is a nightmare.
You can’t look forward at all.
It’s too nuanced and clunky for the average user to stay engaged with it.
Resources
Budget Forms and Tools
David’s New Book - Jesus on Money
David’s New Website - www.stewardshippastors.com